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Digital Bank

Why you should feel revulsion for the term ‘omnichannel’

A lot of folks are asking me whether I’m really saying that banks need to start all over again?  Is that really feasible, Chris?  How can you recommend that we tear down the house and rebuild it? Well, there’s a lot of reasons I can say this, and believe it. First, we started building systems…

Tellers

How to spot a fake Digital Bank

I just heard a presentation from a leading American bank on the need to be digital.  This bank claims to be a digital leader in the US and, from all the PR and headlines, you would believe they were.  Listening to their presentation, you might believe it too: Our CEO leads the digital charge Digital…

Digital channels are just lipstick on a pig

I just sat through a nice presentation from Cognizant President Prasad Chintamaneni at the CEB Summit in Boston … … and was pleased to see others referring to channels and front-end investments as sticking lipstick on a pig.   Something I’ve been saying for a while, as you have to re-engineer the core to be fit…

Prasad

What is Chris smoking? Of course, we’re being disrupted!

Just to finish off my contention that banking is not being disrupted, just evolved or adapted if you prefer, it’s worth a thought about what would it take to cause a disruption. First, I don’t think of disruption in a dictionary sense but in the sense that Clayton Christensen meant it in the book The…

Banks without a digital core will fail

Building on the discussion of data being key to disruption, I often use the phrase ‘digital core’ in this context.  Therefore, I was intrigued when someone asked for a definition of a ‘digital core’ and one of the replies was there isn’t a core anymore.  I wondered what they meant and, in explanation, they referred to…

Bank Fintech worries are obvious … solutions are not as clear

I just finished presenting on Digital Bank strategies and Fintech, and was asked a wide range of questions: How do we transform our legacy structures? What is the biggest obstacle to becoming a digital bank You mention partnerships but all cooperative structures failed in the past, how can we succeed in the future? Can you…

Data personalisation strikes to the heart of bank disruption

I’ve heard a lot of talk this morning about Big Data at a conference here in Barcelona, and had a realisation half way through.  The conversation was all about the move from mass markets and customer segmentation to the market of one and peer-to-peer personalisation.  In other words the deep data mining demanded by Don…

What keeps Jamie Dimon awake at night? (clue: Fintech)

I’ve written a lot about incumbents versus startups lately and noted with interest that Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to JPMorgan shareholders picks up on this theme (not as a direct result I’m sure?).  He talks about “hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking” and that “the…

It’s not the end of banking as we know it, but …

I’m intrigued by how often I hear the line: “banks are stuck in the past”.  Most upstarts and startups are saying that banks have their heads up their rears, aren’t focused upon the future, don’t think out of the box, cannot change, blah blah blah.  Do they really believe this?  Apparently yes.  Such arrogance is…

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