Banks “have to unhinge themselves from the physicality of banking”

I interviewed good friend Brett King last week, author of Bank 2.0, and here’s a podcast that some Finanser readers might enjoy:

Download Brett King Podcast (right-click link to save file)

Brett King from Chris Skinner on Vimeo.

Note that I started by trying to bait Brett a little bit by being a technology and innovation cynic, which I’m not. In fact, most of what he says I’m in violent agreement with.

For example, Brett says that banks “have to unhinge themselves from the physicality of banking” due to the behavioural shift of customers to digital media, which is what his book is all about.

Right now, “most banks won’t be able to cope with that behavioural shift of customers and the way we look to interact daily in terms of money and financial transactions and products.  What will happen is organisations such as Apple, PayPal, Zopa and these sorts of organisations will come in and fill the gaps.

“The banks will still be there as the back-end facilitator, but the user experience will be increasingly owned by a third party.”

This is going to get worse as “most customers can get access to their footprint of information about their relationship with the bank through internet banking, and get a more consolidated view of their relationship with the bank than staff within the bank themselves can get, because they have so many disparate systems within the branch and the call centres.

“The single customer view, which a lot of the banks are working on at the moment, is going to be important.

“But moving forward in the three to five years time span, as traditional media continues to deteriorate in terms of its ROI and ability to engage customers, the key will be behavioural analytics: understanding what customers have done before and trying to anticipate what they will do in the future to provide them with an on-target, impactful offer.”

All good stuff and well worth a listen or even a read.