Inspiration For Innovation: Considerations For Financial Application Design

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Thank you for tuning in to my webinar with Backbase yesterday.  I’m posting the slides and recording after the description below.  Let me know what you think – I appreciate your feedback and your tuning in. Keep innovating!

Backbase Bank 2.0 Webinar Series April 23, 2013

Inspiration For Innovation: Considerations For Financial Application Design

In this Backbase webinar, Bradley Leimer, Vice President, Online and Mobile Strategy at Mechanics Bank and renowned financial technologist and engagement banking proponent discusses customer behavior and related design trends impacting financial application development. He explores topics that are relevant to community banking, financial services, and the changing customer expectations developers now face.

Customer behavior is changing. Expectations are shifting. Technology is accelerating this shift as it acts to alter traditional relationships with our customers as well as the traditional sources of revenue, growth, retention, and customer loyalty. We are moving away from a personal banking relationship to one where the primary relationship is that of utility. Banking becomes something you do through an application, not something you do in a defined location. And those applications better be well designed, because the banking model itself is in jeopardy.

What inspires your teams to innovate and iterate? Why are we not seeing more radical changes in financial application design? While we are still only in the middle stages of this digital transformation, the majority of banks seem destined to be left behind. With the variety of experiences available today, what can we learn from changes in design and customer behavior? What is the role of financial data and identity in this change, and how do we make the concept of big data become a personalized, more meaningful small data experience? If our experience design process were more like Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook, what would that look like? Where else should we look for inspiration?




New Year’s Resolutions for Bank Marketers (Additional Thoughts)

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New Control’s Jim Marous just posted his 22 Industry Leaders Provide New Year’s Resolutions for Bank Marketers. I thought I would share more of the content I provided to Jim for his excellent collection of material of what will impact financial services marketing in the coming year. I appreciate being part of this great piece.

Our industries challenges are many, the pace of innovation is relentless, but the future is bright for those organizations that can remain nimble. I look forward to learning, sharing, and meeting even more of you in 2013. Look for me at Finovate, Future of Money, Bank Innovation (Panel), and NetFinance (Roundtable), and probably a few more places.

Let me know what you think, or schedule some time to discuss.

Evolution of Current Trend: Mobile Engagement 

Between Startups and Large Banks, We’re Going To See Mobile Applications Explode In Unexpected Ways

2013 will move the mobile banking conversation beyond transactions. While certain analysts see mobile phones as driving transactional banking and the tablet as driving financial management tools, this channel preference debate deserves deeper conversation.  In the coming year, we’ll reach the tipping point where more than 50% of all banks and credit unions will have mobile services…but the majority of these applications still offer limited capabilities…transfers, bill pay, a brief snapshot of transactions, maybe some financial management. There is some promise of proximity aware merchant rewards, of transaction level tagging and ongoing engagement through personalization, but we need to deliver more, frankly. We need to engage our customers with their own data, and drive new levels of personalized service to help them create their own value from their transactions. Good examples of this come from Simple or MoneyDesktop, but there is much more to do. As Brett King has said, the opportunity for mobile is not the wallet, it is re-imaging the utility of banking from a mobile perspective. The behavior of mobile payments has been well established, as has the consumption of content through mobile devices.  Banks have the data and the means available to further engage customer’s changing behavior: What does my aggregated financial picture look like right now? Which account should I pay with? Proximity awareness and user preferences will help drive us toward the best place for coffee, restaurants, groceries or gas. Our mobile applications will see renewed  focus on engaging and simplified customer experiences, and improved contextual offer placement. We’ll see more applications leveraging voice, as well as the social graph because individualized preferences are critical. Care to see Norah Jones tonight? There are tickets available, and she’s playing in about two hours. Would you like me to secure tickets for you, make a dinner reservation, and call a cab? Yes please.

 

Single Resolution for 2013: Focus On Onboarding, Acquisition Opportunities, Marketing Automation (Growing New Customers, Existing Customer Cross Sell) 

There are many things that banks and credit unions can improve…so much low hanging fruit.  We have poorly designed websites, we don’t have engaging online banking technology, we put up with fintech partners that don’t deliver compelling mobile technology…we don’t focus on the user experience and a consistent formula for talking to our customers…but what is lost when we don’t have a robust customer onboarding program? How can we leverage technology that delivers an engaging onboarding experience, accross channels? We need to improve our self-service deposit and loan account opening, from those that are self-service through the web and mobile, to those that customers experience in the retail office.

Look what happened during Bank Transfer Day? Customers of big banks moved to big banks, for the most part…because it was simply easier to do so.  Online account opening for new customers can be easily improved, mobile account opening (like we see at USAA) can be added…new ways to leverage leads through the web, social media…get people to the point of commitment, get them on-board as simply and quickly as possible (including improving the in-branch experience), make it easy for existing customers to add new accounts and accept automated credit offers – by improving these areas, banks will start to address the lost revenue from compressed margins, lower fee income from debit and credit, and the nibbling of payment income streams by startups and payment networks. Without continuous customer growth (and related retention efforts), we’ll see the number of financial institutions drop from 14,000 today to half that in a decade. It will happen that fast. Customer behavior is dictating much higher levels of technology investment.

The Coming Year

I ended up publishing over 40 posts to this blog in 2012 and expect 2013 to be more focused on delivering thought-provoking original content.  I plan to discuss everything from building out client facing technology and marketing roadmaps, to sharing experiences working with various consultant groups, along with industry trends in several areas from design to mobile to payments to social to user experience. There is always so much going on in fintech. So watch this space.

I wish you a Happy New Year and continued success with your endeavors.

Brad @Leimer

Simple Adds Attachments, Images, Notes; Customer Gets Into Bar Fight With Wells Fargo On Twitter

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In a blog post today, Simple announced some more UX goodness is being added to its web application (and eventually all updates will migrate to their mobile iOS app).

Merry Early Christmas (or a little late happy Hanukkah). Here’s a quick break down.

They first announced something a little different, something more of us should really pay closer attention to – onboarding. It sets the tone, and if the initial experience goes smoothly, it makes the first six months of activity, cross sell, and long-term retention just that much easier. As most Simple fans are aware, they are attempting be as Apple-like as possible – attempting to simplify the traditional banking experience, from the way you request an invite to the way you receive your initial debit card (Bank Innovation’s JJ Hornblass does a good job of covering that here).

New users are now being invited to view an introductory video (you can see it below) and walk through an introduction to their applications. They focus on how they can “help you use your finances to tell your story.”

That in itself is nice, but it’s the idea behind the video I really like (and would hope they continue to pursue…it would be great to see them do customer videos along this vein).

Think about the concept for a minute. Transaction data telling a personal story. It’s intuitive, yet for every PFM or banking technology provider, what do we do instead? We force our customers to fit their “story” into our parameters.

We dictate how you can edit transactions, set alerts, add notes, and interact with your own data. And it’s so obviously wrong.

Simple added a bit more than a renewed focus on new users and a video this week.

“In Simple’s web app, you can now drag and drop an image or PDF to attach it to a transaction. Upload your receipt so you don’t have to carry it around with you (perfect for business trips), or take a photo of your meal or the friends you were with to remember the occasion.”

Why haven’t we seen this in the transaction data stream before? We’re not talking Wells Fargo’s eVault, Simple is adding a data capture point for any type of upload…images, PDF, receipts.

Lots of startups and bigger tech players are tying image of receipts to help with bill pay (see the US Bank-Mitek partnership)…but this isn’t just about helping with bill pay or expense tracking…it’s adding customization to make financial transactions more meaningful…more customized. We should all take a look at this. With data becoming more and more visual (and mobility adding visualization functions all the time), this could be commonplace very shortly.

Simple continues: “Attach a movie poster to your ticket purchase, or album art to a music purchase. It just looks cool! Select a transaction and click “Edit” to try it out! Coming soon to mobile.”

I love it. It’s like Pinterest or Instagram in your banking application. They should change the linear layout to look like Flipboard…just flip through your transactions today.

simple-transaction-images

The way personal data is changing in every other vertical, and through mobile, is fundamentally opposite of how we build most banking applications today…we lock down customization, the ability to for the user to add and shape, and play with their data.

It’s no wonder most banking and finance applications are so boring.

And it’s also why things like I’ve talked about (connecting social sharing and online/mobile finance applications data, adding social contacts and authentication to applications) are often looked at with skepticism. Don’t ask me about banking and the 4th screen or IFTTT (if then, then that automation of finances). Both are coming. But I digress.

Why has it taken banking so long to figure this out. It’s the customer’s data. We are simply stewards of that data, so let’s open it up a bit…let’s personalize these forms of transaction data…let’s offer more than bar charts. Let’s exchange some value for it by opening up the possibilities of its use, from visualization to personalization. Let people “build a personal story” around their data, much like they would in Facebook, or Pinterest, or other social channels. Even if it’s just for their use…it makes this data more meaningful. And something we want to play with more (just ask the gang from MoneyDesktop).

But wait, there’s more.

“Simple is all about helping you manage your finances by providing context for your transactions. We aim to make it a lot easier to remember when a transaction happened, and where you were by mapping your transactions and including exact timestamps.”

“But maps have never really made much sense for online purchases or monthly bills and subscriptions. To help with this, in the transaction view, you can now see helpful information like recent purchases links and customer service phone numbers for vendors like Amazon, iTunes, and lots more.”

Again, seemingly simple, and obvious. We see it in other services now all the time. But not in banking applications. While more and more PFM apps are showing a bank or merchant logo to help visually identify transaction data to vendor, none have taken the extra step of providing immediate access to contact data for merchants in this way. Take a look.

simple-vendor-cards

Simple throws in a couple of more things, again mirroring standardization in most applications but rarely seen in banking interfaces.

“If you like editing and adding notes to your transactions as much as we do, you’ll be happy to know that you can now edit multiple transactions simultaneously.”

Nice addition, not as earth shattering as the others, but most banking applications do not currently allow for notes to be added at any transaction level.

There is one more thing (and excuse the rambling).

If you aren’t a Simple customer, here’s what the mobile app looks like in the App store:

twitter-simple-vs-wellsfargo-3

A Simple customer recently got into a bar fight with Wells Fargo on Twitter.

At the end of November, Twitter user Tyson Gach went off a bit on Wells Fargo by comparing their mobile app to that from Simple.

I won’t tell you how I caught wind of this (no, I don’t have time to troll Simple or Wells Fargo’s Twitter feed every day), but all I can say is that the folks at Simple are proud of what they have accomplished (and should be).

Take a look.

twitter-simple-vs-wellsfargo

After several tweets, Wells Fargo finally responds.

twitter-simple-vs-wellsfargo-2

I’ve written about Simple’s approach to Twitter and transparency before, but it’s nice to see users stand up in social media to what they consider an average user experience by a big bank. The team at @AskWellsFargo did their best to politely take the feedback. But Tyson, a web designer out of New York (and presumably a Wells and Simple customer), was relentless. And his comments were spot on frankly.

Knowing strategists and developers at both Simple and Wells Fargo, I can tell you they are equally working toward improving the customer experience and adding better functionality.

But with the updates today, Simple’s application delivers a knock out blow.

It’s not even close.

While not everyone thinks Simple will make as big of a dent in the banking universe as I do, you have to admire what they are putting together.

“We never sit still here at Simple. Every day we’re updating, tweaking, building, fixing, and polishing all the tools that make Simple the best way to save and spend.”

Happy Holidays to Simple and to their focus on User Experience.

It Matters. It Always Will.

What Will 2013 Bring to Banking? A Quick Observation

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The gifted editors of American Banker are putting together some thoughts on what the New Year will bring. They are getting input from industry folks that have contributed to their BankThink industry blog in the past year.  I’m not sure how much of my quote will be used, but this is what I added to the mix yesterday.

Be on the lookout for the series before year end.

Update: The post went live at American Banker today (1/7/2013).  Here’s the link.

“2013 will likely be a tipping point in moving the conversation beyond mobile banking. As Brett King has said, the opportunity for mobile is not the wallet, it is re-imaging the utility of banking from a mobile perspective. The behavior of mobile payments has been well established, as has the consumption of content through mobile devices.  Banks have the data and the means available to further engage customer’s changing behavior: What does my aggregated financial picture look like right now? Which account should I pay with? Proximity awareness and user preferences will help drive us toward the best place for coffee, restaurants, groceries or gas. Our mobile applications will see renewed  focus on engaging and simplified customer experiences, and improved contextual offer placement. We’ll see more applications leveraging voice, as well as the social graph because individualized preferences are critical. Care to see Norah Jones tonight? There are tickets available, and she’s playing in about two hours. Would you like me to secure tickets for you, make a dinner reservation, and call a cab? Yes please.”  

The Financial Brand, one of the best sources for industry information, summarized some interesting 2012 FED data around the mobile channel.

mobile-banking-compared-to-traditional

mobile-banking-small-FIs-struggle

mobile-banking-services

Mobile banking is about to become ubiquitous (especially if you agree with a recent ICBA study that says over 80% of all banks and credit unions will have mobile applications of some kind in less than two years).

It’s what we do with mobility beyond banking that will be really interesting.

Chime in.

Movenbank Teases Us A Bit More With Emotional Video + Insights Into Adding Customer Value

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The team at Movenbank continues to tease us with it’s upcoming launch. Here’s the video that came along with Brett King’s post today about why millions of consumers soon won’t need a bank account (his points will certainly resonate).

Try this one on for size:

A coffee company that is better at taking deposits than 95% of the FDIC insured banks in the US, and they don’t even have a banking license.

You’ll want to read more. Now I’m even more curious to see what Brett, Scott, and crew have been working on. Continued success gentlemen.

From the YouTube Description: Know more about your money. Movenbank will help you with simple tools to track and analyze your everyday spending. Start spending smarter and saving more.

Don’t Be Afraid. We’ve Got This.

Makes me think about big data getting small, making transaction and payment data meaningful to the individual customer…something I’ve been talking to a lot of people about.

How do you see the future of banking changing? Here’s another take from Movenbank’s Alex Sion, President and Managing Director:

<iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/Spb2njlX84M&#8221; frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

Movenbank appears to be building much more than a nice UX.

Let’s see where this goes.

Discerning Technologist Named Among Best Banking Blogs of 2012 by @FinancialBrand

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This morning my blog Discerning Technologist was named as one of the Editor’s Choices for best banking blogs of 2012 by The Financial Brand. I can’t thank Jeffry Pilcher enough for including my blog with these great industry voices.

Here’s what the Financial Brand said by naming Discerning Technologist one of the 21 best banking blogs on the internet:

Discerning Technologist – This blog includes discussions about financial innovations, online and mobile channels, UX and marketing. Authored by Bradley Leimer, VP of Online/Mobile Strategy at Mechanics Bank, who provides insight into how marketers can leverage technology changes for an improved customer experience. bradleyleimer.com

I think every one of the 21 blogs mentioned offer an excellent view of the financial services spectrum. I’ll certainly be voting for some of my favorites as well, including Brett King’s Banking4Tomorrow, Chris Skinner’s Financial Services Club Blog, Jim Breune’s Netbanker, JJ Hornblass’s Bank Innovation, Jim Marous’s Bank Marketing Strategy, Finextra, Christophe Langlois’s Visible Banking, Ron Shevlin’s Snarketing 2.0, Serge Milman’s Optirate, as well as industry views from Intuit’s banking.com, and the JD Power Banking Blog. I would also highly suggest you consider writing in a few of the following candidates for best financial blog include the thoughts from David Birch, Yann Ranchere, Aden Davies, Walt Cox, JP Nicols, and Peter Vander Auwera.

If you find my blog posts (and associated Twitter feed) an important part of your efforts to innovate in the financial space, then please consider voting for my blog at the Financial Brand. Thank you for your consideration – and remember to vote!

I’m Bradley Leimer, and I’ve approved this message.

Best of Show Locked Up? @MoneyDesktop Demo At #Finovate

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Finovate: Disneyland of Fintech™

I was watching the live feed of the Apple iPhone 5 announcement this morning (no NFC news, unfortunately), but I could tell I was really missing something in New York by how much the #Finovate twitter stream just blew up.

But Let Me Step Back A Bit

Finovate, which I dubbed the Disneyland of Fintech™ a few years back, is the premier financial technology conference established by Jim Breune of Netbanker fame and its gifted co-founder Eric Mattson. If you have an opportunity to meet Jim and Eric and talk shop, you’ll be more than happy you did – they are genuinely great people. Fantastic conference, and a fantastic team.

What, you’ve never heard of Finovate and you’re following this blog?

Finovate is 64 companies over 2 days, live demos, and nothing but live applications (well, *live* is sometimes a stretch). Overall, the conference has always been a fantastic experience, and it is now in four locations: New York, San Francisco, London, and headed to Singapore in November.

But let’s get back to talking about this morning.

Best of Show Already Won On Day One?

While there will be a number of Best-of-Show-worthy entrants at this NY focused Finovate conference (LearnVest, Personal Capital), I can just tell that one of the winners has already been firmly established.

It’s a little PFM firm out of Utah. And they’ll likely hate that characterization – because the team is thinking way beyond PFM.

Enter MoneyDesktop.

Outside of being the fastest growing white-label PFM application in history, the team at MoneyDesktop is on fire.

OK, I made that up, the largest PFM provider (and likely the fastest growing) remains our partner Intuit with FinanceWorks and Mint (and likely to get bigger with this week’s little API announcement).

MoneyDesktop entered the PFM space just a few years ago and now have over 300 clients in the PFM space. After their Best-of-Show win at FinovateSpring in San Francisco, they have the attention of much larger U.S. based financial institutions and a host of larger fintech players that realize the need to refocus on UX.

User Experience Trumps All

That was my message in the spring, and it’s the same message now.

And it will continue to be my mantra as I build out my bank’s technology stack and further partner in the fintech, banking, and payment application space.

Why all the excitement about the MD UX? It’s a fresh approach to the stale, linear look of online banking, and charts and graphs of some of the other PFM providers.

Do I want them to do more? Absolutely.

There is much to be learned across the fintech spectrum (and even better to look outside of fintech), and the landscape is changing every day – but you have to hand it to them, they are moving things forward. True, as several of my fintech friends pointed out, their UX borrows a lot from Bundle, and other applications – but the way they interface dials around financial data is still pretty unique.

Build For One, Apply to All

Primarily a Ruby shop, MD makes multi-device, single application development look easy. And it’s not. That’s why I have a great deal of respect for Ryan’s team. They are able to move their product forward in big chunks, continue to improve their application while in hyper-growth mode, and seem to have a great deal of fun as they work their ass of. I can really respect that. As I can respect the passion exhibited by everyone I have met on the team.

You Need To Control Your Own Spin Like Your Life Depends On It

Even if you don’t see the MoneyDesktop application as the best thing for your financial institution, there are some lessons from this morning that can apply to just about any business. As I have written about many times before – social has changed the way we evangelize our company, the way we market our products, the way we connect to prospective employees and prospects (see my thoughts on American Banker last week).

MD is doing these things very well, from their social-savvy team to their code-infused billboards to lure developers – this should be a lesson for the larger fintech players demoing at Finovate and presenting in boardrooms.

They control their own spin. Whether they actively discuss it or not.

They develop their evangelists. Whether they strategize that or not.

And they own social chatter at conferences like Finovate.

Which is just as likely to be snarky as it is positive.

Just ask Jim and Eric about the tweets complaining about the Wi-Fi.

So that’s why a product’s user experience matters.

Ship something highly engaging, you’ll start to get the right kind of attention.

While they may not necessarily integrate social chatter within their applications (at least not yet), but the MD team connects with people in the banking and fintech industry exceptionally well.

Matt West (aka @matt__west), Nate, Dave, and the rest of the sales and marketing team not only work to evangelize their product well, but they connect and follow-up with people in a very engaging way.

Maybe it’s because their from Utah and not New York City, I’m not sure…but their enthusiasm and follow-up are things your fintech teams need to be looking at.

If you are going to have impact with decision makers, then you have to reach out, and prepare to physically own a conference that gets a positive sales boost (like at Finovate). These things matter.

Pertinent Microsites Matter

MD also had a nice microsite with a similar demo from earlier today at the ready – and are sharing it effectively to people at the conference and those trolling the #finovate feed.

Take a look.

From the MD site:

MoneyDesktop Inc. introduces MoneyMobile and our new MoneyDesktop “widgets” – the worlds most powerful and engaging financial platform that will change the way your account holders feel about financial management. MoneyDesktop and MoneyMobile’s award-winning designs makes managing money not only easier and more convenient – but a lot more enjoyable and exciting as well. Now, your account holders will be able to visualize their data in meaningful and engaging ways on their desktop, tablet and phone. Created with the philosophy that “User Experience Trumps All” – MoneyDesktop and MoneyMobile will make you want to reach out and touch your finances!

Why PFM Matters

I like the idea of moving financial management tools front and center (in essence aggregated cross-channel white-label PFM becomes the interface), and combining these tools for consumers and small businesses to engage with their data (that’s the key – getting users energized to actually actively manage their aggregated financial goals). For that reason, I am a big fan of a host of other PFM providers as well – from Intuit, Geezeo, Meniga, Perfectsen, and others – and like MoneyDesktop, the development and sales teams at each are top notch.

It doesn’t matter if it’s white label to banks and credit unions, or if it’s direct to consumer/business – the idea behind PFM matters – let’s work together as an industry to make it better – to learn from companies like these, and interfaces like Movenbank and Simple – to truly have impact in our client’s lives.

The banking model is changing – the key component of successful banking application development will be the user experience (presentation layer) combined with exceptional experiences and value added functions that leverages financial and personally identifiable data (a whole other series of posts).

Maybe that’s a little too much twitter talking, or maybe it’s the iPhone 5 announcement that has me punchy and upbeat – but whatever it is that inspires you to make your products and services better, just move it forward.

User experience matters, the way we interact with, protect, and offer value through data matters – especially for fintech applications.

Stop talking, start doing.

 

There’s one more day of Finovate – time to really start innovating.