Comments on: 2008 Predictions: Online Trends in Financial Services

By: aşk

aşk — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:09:09 +0000

Looked very promising, but when I contacted support over and again about not being able to search Groups, unable to add retirement accounts from Fidelity Investments, I never got any response.
So much for a website that houses all your personal info..how can you trust them anymore ?? I can’t.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:00:11 +0000

Oh and one more thing. Your last point is somewhat doubtful I think, simply because banks are (historically) doing extremely well for themselves. In the UK, the financial services sector has gone from being a 5th of the UK’s economy to almost a 3rd in 10 years. They don’t need inspiration - they’re doing just fine as they are (and a very large proportion of that is done off line).

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 08:56:34 +0000

An interesting list here. Do you have a reason why 2008 in particular will be when banks get serious about customer experience? Most of what you say on that point (like the fact that financial products are complicated) has been true well before the net came along. Having worked on a couple of consumer banking projects myself, it’s easy to be cynical about this. For example, the banks like to present “choice” in mortgages but in fact each product is designed to cost the same (and make the bank the same) amount of money. Choice is therefore simply a matter of fashion. 2008 might therefore be a year in which “choice” is temporarily replaced with “simplicity” in mortgages (possibly because of a property slump). Dynamic and relationship pricing is interesting though, and there is some evidence they are doing this already. The trouble is that without very careful planning, they will find themselves in extremely hot legal water with the regulators and consumer groups (”Our systems say you have a lot of debt - here, have some some with this “special” rate credit card - bwah ha ha.”)

By: benry

benry — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:25:23 +0000

Well put Scott.

I think many banks and credit unions are already trying to do #1 but no one is truly doing it differently and standing out from the pack. Everyone’s saying the same things and trying to be the same.

#2, not sure I agree. I think the implementations have been too complex to date. Most folks just want balance, last 5 transactions. Bill pay and much of the other functionality is overkill and adds complexity given the wide variety of handsets/devices.

#3, odd that others aren’t already doing this. For the past 3+ years we’ve been leveraging our analytics on our site https://www.nscu.com to drive user experience design. Frankly the opportunity here is beyond A/B and multivarient and is with behavioral targeting.

#4, this will happen or they will figure out ways to build their own as CIBC has done with its PFM.

By: Scott Weisbrod

Scott Weisbrod — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:32:09 +0000

Update on the mobile banking front already - Bank of America launched an iPhone app. More info at Netbanker. One of the comments on the Netbanker post indicate that it needs some work still.

By: Scott Weisbrod

Scott Weisbrod — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:37:41 +0000

Hey Geoff. Banks as an entity won’t change their behaviour anytime soon. But, I believe that progressive e-commerce or marketing departments responsible for parts of the site are desperate to adapt a more agile (not the method, necessarily) approach to launching new services online. Fidelity is the best example of this. They’ve created a beta site with a bunch of great tools called Fidelity Labs.

By: Geoff Sowrey

Geoff Sowrey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:30:59 +0000

I hate to be a nay-sayer, but how much faith do you have in banks (as a whole) — institutional organisations — at acting in the Web 2.0/Agile practise of small, frequent iterative releases? My view/experience is that these guys will take months to sort out details, merging them into massive point releases that put out huge amounts of content.

So the question: Do you predict banks (as a whole) changing this behaviour?