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American Banker held its Retail Banking 2014 conference in Orlando, FL this week. Here, in tweets, are a few of its takeaways.
March 14 -
You might expect Manolo Sanchez, the CEO of BBVA Compass, to renounce traditional branches since his bank is spending $117 million on the online-only startup Simple. But he joined other senior bank executives in defending the branch as "still relevant."
March 14 -
The acquisition of Simple gives the bank a platform it couldn't have built on its own, says BBVA Compass CEO Manolo Sanchez.
March 13
I flew out to Orlando last week expecting the following themes to dominate American Banker's Retail Banking 2014 conference: Branches
These tenets certainly took up their fair share of conversation. (The word "customer-centric" and/or all its variations pretty much played on a steady loop.) But there were a few themes/nuances that cropped up during the conference that indicated the trends in retail banking are evolving. Here are few predications based off of them.
A positive spin around branches will proliferate. I wasn't surprised when Catherine Bessant, the global technology and operations executive at Bank of America, asserted, "there is a role for physical banking" during her keynote talk with American Banker Magazine's Heather Landy. (Her colleague Rob Aulebach indicated
I was surprised, however, that Manolo Sanchez, chief executive of the increasingly tech-savvy BBVA Compass, and Bruce Van Saun, CEO of RBS Citizens Financial Group, which
Get ready for lots of talk about wearable tech. As part-time writer of American Banker's Morning Scan, I was similarly non-plused when it took all of two minutes for crypto currency and nonstop headline-maker Bitcoin to get name-dropped at Retail Banking 14 (courtesy of Source Media Group Editorial Director and conference co-chairman Richard Melville). My ears did perk up, however, about 10 minutes later when BBVA's Sanchez mentioned Her the Spike Jonze movie in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an operating system since Wells Fargo's Armin Ajami was framing his forthcoming BankThink Live segment on wearable tech with the exact same reference. And when New Control's Jim Marous included Google Glass as a potential part of his
It feels like a bit of a stretch to compare this type of tech to Bitcoin, because, I agree with Marous's ultimate assessment: current incarnations, Google Glass included, aren't exactly ready for primetime and appear nowhere near as disruptive. But I do think wearable technology, like Bitcoin back in early 2013, is poised to dominate more of the fin-tech conversation and will be equally as polarizing.
M&A will be big this year
between banks and nonbanks. The big story out of Night One was that BBVA Compass was not planning to "
Partnerships remained a recurring theme throughout the conference. (There was even an inordinate amount of talk of banks partnering with each other on various initiatives.) As such, I feel inclined to
Jeanine Skowronski is the deputy editor of BankThink. You can contact her at