Roughly one in three banking and insurance customers globally would consider switching their accounts to Google, Amazon, or Facebook ,if the tech giants offered financial services, according to a new survey.

Google , Amazon & Facebook have been setting standards for degree of personalisation & powerful customer experience.

Newspapers are getting disrupted by online resources. These same web destinations are becoming less relevant as people simply lift and filter the information they want using RSS feeds. The music CD is being unbundled as customers buy individual tracks online Power has shifted to customers: it’s no longer about the products that marketers want to sell but about the content components that users want to consume & mash up together.

The new battlefield lies in the control of the user interface and the customer intelligence system that supports it. Companies that build highly equipped Customer intelligence units will win in the coming days.

The other thing, which the new-age companies do very well, is the notion of ‘profitable data sharing’. They do not hesitate to share data across partners to ensure their customers get a kickass solution. They share data through APIs. There are over 14,441 APIs offered by firms today, according to programmableweb.com.

Amit the Co-Founder & Chief Curator of Let’s Talk Payments had this interesting statement:  “As FinTech startups continue to disrupt traditional financial services, banks are also waking up to the fact that offering an open API—where developers can latch on and create very specific customized app solutions—is the way to engage and retain their customers in the future”.

Adaptive Path, a design and user experience consultancy has been acquired by Capitol One. And just before that Daniel Makoski, founder of Google’s modular Project Ara phone project joined Capital One.

In the new digital world, banking & creativity may not be oxymorons!

New banks in India have a unique opportunity to embed “digital” in the fabric of how they do business. But banks are complex with structures that don’t allow for speed. In many cases, eBusiness teams own the mobile banking strategy, but few eBusiness teams have an exclusive mandate over their firm’s mobile banking initiatives. This division of responsibility creates silos and adds significant complexity to the coordination and optimization of Digital efforts.

What does design have to do with finance, money and banking?

Brands that use design very effectively are far easier to spot nowadays because we interact so much with fast growing digital businesses, Ola, Amazon etc. Consumers, especially Millennials, are learning to expect more from the companies they choose to do business with. And they are not limiting their benchmarks within one industry-I want my Netbanking to be as easy as the Uber interface!

‘Project Pokhran’, as Paytm calls its payments bank project is due for launch the summer of 2017 & they may begin to look at banking very differently.

New banks in India ,IDFC & Bandhan, better be listening.

A few years ago Adaptive Path, a design and user experience consultancy was acquired by Capitol One. And just before that Daniel Makoski, founder of Google’s modular Project Ara phone project joined Capital One.

Then Capital one acquired Money management App, Level Money. The app is focused on the Millenials & helps users set savings goals & offers suggestions for what they can do with their extra cash.

Capital One recently launched what is called as Capital one Labs. This is what they call the “rogue innovation arm” of the bank. Lab members have opened a series of “Capital One 360 Cafes”, a hybrid of a coffee shop & a bank branch. Here employees interview café customers to get real time feedback on new prototypes.

In the new digital world, banking & creativity may not be oxymorons!

Some time back I came across this Job requiremnet at Capital one:

Design Strategist

As a strategic thinker with a focus on innovation for our banking business, you will have the opportunity to define, design, and develop new products and services that defy industry expectations and meet real human needs.

At Capital One, we’re building a leading information-based technology company. Still founder-­led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard Fairbank, Capital One is on a mission to help our customers succeed by bringing ingenuity, simplicity, and humanity to banking. We measure our efforts by the success our customers enjoy and the advocacy they exhibit. We are succeeding because they are
 succeeding.

New banks in India have a unique opportunity to embed “digital” in the fabric of how they do business. Maybe some of them will come up with teams that include a “Design strategist”.

But banks are complex with structures that don’t allow for speed. In many cases, eBusiness teams own the mobile banking strategy, but few eBusiness teams have an exclusive mandate over their firm’s mobile banking initiatives. This division of responsibility creates silos and adds significant complexity to the coordination and optimization of Digital efforts.

And yet, the user experience is the key for more consumers to adopt the bank’s digital channels.

As the infrastructure of digital technology — the chips, network connections, computing — becomes ever cheaper, they’re becoming commodities, and the value of tech products is shifting to the design and the user experience. But the real value starts to flow when companies orchestrate the User experience with Personalisation.

Personalization, it seems, is really about gathering exactly the data that’s needed in order to perform a particular task. Think about how Amazon asks users whether purchases were for themselves or as gifts, or how streaming services like Netflix and Pandora ask users to rate content. But personalization is a complex process involving multiple components:

Some areas to ponder about:

• What do you think about the internet & mobile disrupting banks? Which areas can the banks defend and which are vulnerable to disruption?
• What do banks need to do to modernise their architectures to compete against the new wave of startups? Will they offer API’s to other brands?
• What is the new age Customer intelligence unit that can be the nerve centre for competing in this landscape? How do they capture unique customer data & create a competitive differentiator by mapping the Customer DNA ?
• How will banks completely transform their digital experience? Or would the new Fintech innovators show the banks the way?

It would be interesting to see how the new Indian banks & the existing players shape up to this new reality.

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