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After failing to respond to customer demand and missing tectonic shifts in money transmission and online and mobile payments, banks have an opportunity in the emerging area of cryptographic money.
July 18 -
Companies that provide on-demand, cross-account control and recommendations are best positioned to serve evolving consumer behavior. Banks that dont get ahead of this shift could be relegated to the role of back-end infrastructure provider.
July 17 -
Branch numbers will grow again while the industrys total branch square footage goes down. More customers will choose their banks based on the availability of a branch they wont use all that much.
July 16 -
Future banking will feel more like a medical relationship, serving customers with the intimacy and attention of the family doctor. This will require a Hippocratic-oath level of trust.
July 15
The question every bank should ask itself is "Am I a creator or a remover of friction?"
John Hagel hit the nail on the head in a recent
A really good example of this is
The same phenomenon is now happening everywhere, including in banking, as we see the advent of more peer-to-peer (mobile) payment systems.
Besides disintermediation, we have disintegration. What we witness is the end of highly vertically integrated organizations, and the birth of organizations whose chief strength is to pick and choose best-in-class functionality from outsiders and mix and match those with their own internal world-class capabilities. For that to happen, you need a decomposition of previously highly integrated functions into smaller chunks (for example risk management, payments, securities,
So if all this is commonplace, what's the next big disruption? In my opinion it's peer-to-peer, the ability of two or more entities to share data and do business without a central orchestrator. P2P changes everything. It changes product and service offerings, it changes how companies are organized; it fundamentally changes the business models we are used to. This is very quickly leading to a "fragmentation of everything": the fragmentation of work, of applications, of hierarchies, of states.
To illustrate how deep the change is, I'd like to use the metaphor of a camel in the ocean. The camel is the bank, and the water is data. Until now, the camel was carrying its own water through the desert. Now the camel is in the ocean, surrounded by data. We will require a new kind of species that can survive in this data ocean, can cope with the advent of trillions of nodes on the grid, all hyper-connected, hyper-fragmented and 100%
The world needs a new kind of bank, way beyond a money-bank, probably a "
We seem to live in a "perpetual crisis," jumping from one incident to another, where there is no room anymore for building a story with a beginning, middle, and an end; no room for reflection, no room to assess and, like a surfer, scan the waves of change on the surface of the data ocean. It's like the camel is under water, drowning in tactics and ad-hoc firefighting, incapable of interpreting the tsunami of change.
The world enters a level of complexity that cannot be addressed anymore by conventional, binary, linear thinking. We need new tools, capabilities, and more non-linear ways of thinking, to be prepared to open up for more options. These new tools are about forecasting and assessing in different ways, deciding our options in different ways, ambitious design thinking with focus on what needs to be achieved versus what is the problem to be solved, and richer ways of expressing our options through visual thinking and other techniques.
This is way beyond the flashy designs of hyper-tech branches and "punchy-music-cool-sexy" apps or product videos.
The bank of the future is a humanizing bank, where "I am not my device" and where the focus is on relationships, intimacy, depth, and human connection supported by technology. It's about deep human behavior, about deep culture change. But that does not happen through top-down instruction. What is needed is viral change at scale of specific behaviors, seeded and
Peter Vander Auwera is co-founder of Innotribe, a team that promotes innovation at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. He blogs at