Imagining Innovation — What Banks Can Expect Beyond 2014
Stories from the Vault: Real Insight from Real Bankers
(Interview by Prue Duggan, via BradleyLeimer.com and BankNxt.com; Abridged)
Bradley Leimer, financial services industry technologist, consultant, and commentator, leads digital strategy for Northern California-based Mechanics Bank. His focus is on developing and integrating technology applications and partnerships geared toward improving the client experience and profitability of digital channels. He brings additional perspective from leading marketing and technology efforts within the bank and credit union industry and from a decade driving database marketing and analytic programs for more than 6,500 national, regional, and community bank clients. Bradley is a sought after adviser for startups entering the financial and payments space.
“How you view the current environment likely correlates to your sense of urgency and overall disruption in the banking industry. While we may not all agree on the impact, the shift to digital will certainly have consequences. We’re moving toward an era of engagement banking — a marketing, sales and service model that deploys technology to achieve customer intimacy at scale.”
You’re recognized as a leading financial technologist — what are some of your over-arching goals in leveraging technology within financial services?
While people may associate me with fintech, I certainly tweet enough about it, I think I might be more of a social scientist or macro-economist at heart. I’ve always been very curious about consumer behavior and why people act the way they do. Especially why they buy what they buy, how they pay for goods and services, how the movement of goods reflect societal value, and what society gets in return for those exchanges. While there are certainly differences in delivery and scale across social and economic spectrums and geography, there are basic human needs that financial applications help fulfill. Whether that need is fulfilled by an existing bank today, or will be in the future is another story. We shouldn’t be selling products and services; we’re facilitating daily human needs and enabling people’s dreams.
My ultimate goal is to be part of making these functions more inclusive, to really improve the banking system as whole. I think the way we leverage technology in the future will have a lot to do with helping our industry move forward. I also think it’s critical that technologists, and everyone in banking really, strive to be perpetually curious and always working to understand how we can improve the lives of the people and businesses in our communities, to see the bigger picture of where dots are connecting a ways off into the distance. It’s a critical time for banks to review their place in society and in their communities, not just here in the U.S., but worldwide. The traditional banking model certainly has some cracks in it.
Is the difficulty banks have in embracing change one of their biggest obstacles in terms of innovating?
I think it’s about more than just embracing change. Our industry is overly fixated on regulation and risk. We’re too afraid to experiment. And at this point of history in financial services, FIs under twenty to fifty billion in assets don’t have the scale to screw around and not take additional risks to stand out. We start with ‘no’ as our default answer far too often. This mindset leads to a legacy of friction that disruptors are starting to exploit. Our model simply must adapt to changes more quickly. We must keep up with the simplicity, usability and transparency customers now demand. The disruptors see that the future of financial services will be won by removing traditional barriers and rapidly embracing the shift in consumer and business behavior. Things are moving incredibly fast.
Do you think that the digital channels could help community banks recreate that traditional ‘one-to-one relationship’ feeling that was previously the domain of small town bricks-and-mortar banks?
I think it’s incredibly valuable to have smaller, community based financial institutions as a natural economic hedge to promote financial inclusion and drive more equitable financial relationships with local businesses and consumers. I wrote a piece about this question earlier this year as part of American Banker’s Future Model of Banking series called “There Will Be Blood: The Era of Engagement Banking”. In this piece, I tried to make it perfectly clear: The rise of personalized digital financial and payment experiences are the likely death knell for community banking institutions. The next five to ten years is absolutely critical if you are a financial institution with under twenty to fifty billion in assets.
Decades ago financial relationships were much simpler. You put money in a local bank or credit union and you accessed your accounts in person or wrote checks. When credit and debit came along, you had cards linked to these accounts at that local bank and accessed cash through ATMs. We pushed people out of the branch and ‘Oops’, now they aren’t coming back (and branches aren’t convenient anyway, so why should they?). Now your financial life is much broader, your financial relationships have wider scope and are likely at seven or more institutions. With the rise of the app ecosystem, your financials decisions are becoming much more integrated with other decisions you make throughout the day. Decisions that are more likely driven by a national bank, credit card, or third party financial experience than anything else. While every industry is impacted by the rise of highly personalized digital experiences, it’s very hard for smaller banks to keep up without scale and agile development. Ask Blockbuster how they fared as Netflix and digital flipped the equation. The same will go for banking.
What is your vision for the future of banking, taking into account the rapid advancements we’ve seen in just the last few years?
Technology is simply accelerating an existing shift in traditional relationships with our customers and this is having an impact on the banking industry’s historical sources of revenue. While we may not all agree on the impact, the shift to digital will certainly have consequences. The banking model is moving towards a truly contextual, customer-centric view. Shifts in consumer behavior demand less intrusive authentication, social connectivity and crowd sourcing, hyper-personalization of everything from offers to usability, as well as tailored assistance and support at critical moments. We are now face-to-face with an engaged customer base that expects a completely frictionless experience. As we move further into the realm of digital experiences, the next decade will be even more incredibly disruptive than what we saw in the recent economic downturn. As I’ve said before: There will be blood. The reality is that banking is no longer something customers just do. It’s becoming an experience they will completely control. We are moving away from a banking relationship defined by the goal of being a customer’s primary financial institution to one where we focus on becoming their primary financial application. It’s no longer about wallet share. It’s about app-driven mindshare — being ready for the moment our customers reach into their pockets for their mobile device, or their glasses, or other form of wearable technology, and start thinking about their financial relationship choices — before, during and after a financial moment of truth. The question really is, how is your bank or credit union going to survive the next decade?
