Nuevos actores en la Industria Bancaria

 Ana, la chica que vende hotdogs desea un préstamo para expandir su negocio. Debido a su escaso historial financiero no puede acceder a créditos de inversión desde la Banca. Su amigo Samuel le ha sugerido usar un servicio de Alternative Lending Lends4All. Ana abre su cuenta de usuario en Lends4All y en menos de una hora cuenta con el prestamo desembolsado en su cuenta de PayPal. Tras Lends4All, el dinero que ha llegado a manos de Ana provienen de una inversión de pensión jubilar de Vicente, de una inversión baja de un estudiante anónimo y de los fondos de una Parroquia que también son parte de Lends4All. Un nuevo jugador financiero.

Los bancos enfrentan hoy un reto como nunca antes, no se trata de competir contra otros bancos sino contra varios "jugadores" distintos, las famosas FinTech que proveen servicios financieros alternativos y complementarios, Bancos Digitales, BigTechs como Apple o WeChat, Banks Over the Top, Crowfunding, Alternative Lending, Blockchain, Ahorro Colectivo, Pagos Coletivos, Monederos digitales, Banca Sachet, Consejeros Robóticos de inversión, E-Marketplaces, por mencionar unos cuantos.

En India se implementó un servicio de Pagos colectivos sobre Facebook, en China WeChat es el hub de servicios de pago mas grande. Bancos Sachet como Acorn o StashInvest ofrecen productos de inversión desde los $5 y han logrado captar más de 2 billones de dólares. ¿donde quedarán los bancos en el futuro? ¿Reinventarse? ¿Adaptarse? Incluirse en un nuevo ecosistema es lo más lógico, ser el eslabon clave en las cadenas de valor, ofrecer valor añadido a sus clientes.  Cambiar la experiencia del usuario, ser un asistente financiero y facilitar la administración de los fondos para sus clientes. Enterarse de cuáles son los intereses de un cliente y ayudarle a conseguir sus objetivos por el tan solo hecho de ser cliente. 

La omnicanalidad es un paso en esa evolución hacia servicios de ecosistemas. Veremos más allá, una banca móvil, ubícua, que garantice seguridad a los datos e inversiones. Veremos bancos que eliminan completamente ciertas cadenas de atención humana y respuesta acelerada para determinados servicios.

Nuevos productos reclaman a la banca ser parte de un ecosistema, no un silo o un monopolio financiero. El crowfunding de inversión podría ser gestionado eficientemente desde la banca, actuando como garante y ofreciendo especialistas en inversiones, análisis de riesgo, planificación urbana, etc. Productos que formen un frente sólido de inversión abierto a quien desee poner $10 o al que desea hacerlo con $100.000 dentro de un  solo grupo inversor.

Digital Maturity Model for Banks' Digital Transformation

As I noted in my last post, Banks should define their roadmap for Digital Transformation, But it is mandatory to have in hand the definitive Digital Maturity Model, something like the well-known CMMI for the Software Industry. This model should provide levels of maturity for Banks. I´ve been amazed to see a lot of banks struggling with their own models. Consultants imposing their models, models built on the GO.

Since the Banking industry, just try searching the web for this term and easily there will be more than 250K results, none of them is a clear standard, none of them comes from a common source. So, as we are in such a state of multiple efforts to have a good model, the only way out is to evaluate the success possibilities around and take one. Any other suggestions? Yes, right, the best path eventually be not the best one. We fail in the dilemma of choosing the best based on the nearest truth. This means, that after benchmarking the market that affects the bank, something will come up and that will be the ideal model. Sad but true, as Metallica´s song says??. Not at all, the truth is that the banking industry is big, the threats vary from place to place, and it is not practical to compare one bank in New York to another one in Sri Lanka. Different realities? yes. In the end, there are different approaches, full of good intentions. This means that the bank across the street will implement a different model than its neighbor.  boooo, scary!

It is scary just if you think that Bank 1 considers that the level of digitalization for, let´s say its front office is roughly 80% and the Bank 2 assumes that for them the same level is 70%, but wait, The Bank A has 40 applications and Bank 2 has 110 applications. Sorry for Bank 2, now is paying for having a lot more in applications than its rival.

Now, the point here shows how important is to adopt the right Maturity Model and be prepared to understand where is located the bank in question. Something like the problem of two-speed runners, the first one like Bolt, tall, slender, etc, the second one will be a small man from X country who runs 100 m just 0.2 seconds behind Bolt. It is clear that regardless of the runner´s height and other physical factors, the winner is the one who scores less time for the same distance.

A common approach to measure the maturity index is to consider

1. Front Office
2. Middle Office
3. Back Office

and determine the percentage of Medium, Basic and Advanced degree of digitalization in everyone.  As far as now, the Front Office in all banks has more chances to improve its digital face, nevertheless, all 3 have an impact on Customer Experience and are affected by Service Design. Again, the Maturity Model comes to show that it is important to measure Digital Maturity as a whole. What an intersting point,  isn´t it?

Keep in mind to have KPIs and adopt a standardized model.

Most solutions fall in Customer Service digitalization, but the real Digital Transformation is a whole.   Hence, the maturity model should encompass internal and external actors affected by systems and operations.

Back in 2011, the vision of the branch of the future defined a revolutionary approach in customer service at the branch level, it depicted integrated channels for service, Mobile as the biggest container, then inside these web applications that covered call center and the call center keeping inside the traditional Branch and the philosophy behind the concept is to have a continuous process of performance improvement. The missing concept behind this proposal was the model itself, there are thousands of banks, each one living a particular reality, that is why we need a common framework, no less no more.

Crafting the path for a real Digital Transformation for Banks

Days ago talking with friends and after a short survey, I could confirm something that I just was wondering, in the Digital Transformation (DX) adventure it's easy to find financial institutions that believe in DX and have its roadmap, others that have been watching and have some steps addressed to change things but are misunderstanding transformation with filling themselves with a bunch of systems and applications, others that are aware of this change but do not know where to start, others who have not done anything. To cut short, the scale is full of representatives at any level.

One thing that attracted my attention is the majority is talking about FinTechs, FinTechs up, FinTechs down, in the sky, at the gym, FinTechs (FTs) everywhere and do not see that the main threat are themselves.  First, Banks should learn to survive and live with those alternate "money and financial disruptors", never ever better than today to say: If you cannot defeat them, be part of them".

Let's be clear,  there's a bunch of FT flourishing everywhere,  giant technology companies like Apple or Google with humongous numbers of data form credit card holders and users, PayPal running wild on money transfers,  in Asia the social networks allow for money transfers, Facebook and WhatsApp can take the hell upside down if they provide with money transfers and personal loans. Let's face it, FinTechs are the face of simplicity, that's why they are the best alternative in disruptive solutions.

But, DX it is not just fighting against FTs, it is about simplification, it is about do more with less effort. Unfortunately, less effort means less headcount in many situations. Here, it is important to plan with people in mind. Your workforce knowledge can lead to a bright future with better business services and lines. Who can tell what is wrong or right? Your people, who else, so why do you will fire them?

The roadmap definition is not enough, there's a lot to take in account:

- Customer
- Processes
- Key Services
- Technology
- Security
- Key indicators
- Follow up dashboards
- Strategy

Nevertheless, the main pillars to define a real  DT roadmap are:

Customer on board	Strategy	Technology	Operations	Culture. Organization. People
Aquisition	Brand Management	Applications	Agile Change Management	Culture
Customer Experience	Ecosystem Management	Connectivity	Automatic Resource Management	Leadership and Governance
Behavior Knowledge	Investment and Financing	Data and Analytics	Integrated Services Management	Organizational Talent Design Management
Trust and Perception	Market and customers	Distribution Gonvernance	Understanding and Real Time Analysis	Workforce enablement
	Portfolio, Concept and Innovation	Networking	Adaptive and Intelligent process management
	Stakeholders Management	Security	Standards' Automation and Governance
	Strategic Management	Architecture

There are advices, yes of course, a lot. But every company is quite different. So, it is mandatory to have master advisors at hand. Take care when dealing with technologies like Blockchain or Kubernets implementations (to name a couple) , technical resources are scarce and you need good ones.

To finish this post, take a look at BBVA, they have an innovation pool, good to check for Apps ideas for your bank. Take a look, reinvent your services, get better ones.

Links and tips for AGILE and LEAN

Representative People to follow: 

Martin Fowler

Uncle Bob

Dan North

Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Kent Beck

Mike Beedle

Arie van Bennekum

Alistair Cockburn

Ward Cunningham

James Grenning

Jim Highsmith

Andrew Hunt

Ron Jeffries

Jon Kern

Brian Marick

Steve Mellor

Ken Schwaber

Jeff Sutherland

Dave Thomas

James Shore

Jurgen Apelo

Libros, hay unos que son obligatorios, esta la biblia continuous delivery:http://continuousdelivery.com/

The pragmatic programmer

Refactoring to Patterns

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Growing Object-Oriented Software

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Los ultimos son muy tecnicos, como yo te he dicho ando muy enfocado a ser buen desarrollador, los buenos programadores, generan, mejores resultados, mejores aplicaciones, por eso me gusta el cuento de software craftsmanship porque es un pacto con el aprendizaje, con la calidad, con el mejoramiento continuo

Sitios 

http://skillsmatter.com/

http://www.infoq.com/

The evolution from User eXperience to Service Design in the Banking Industry

UX, the upper level, the visual side, that layer where Interaction Design shares glories with Usability, both of them glued with Visual Design. That layer where Content (and content strategists command) and User Research reign. UX, the starting point for a more and more complex universe.

Certainly, you have heard terms such as UX and CX. CX a wider concept than UX. CX is something like a metamorphosis, the monkey transformed into a human. It is when the street walker attracted by a casual billboard decides to enter the store and demands high quality service. Everything in CX starts with a Brand; the Brand eventually would shine or suffer deprecation, all by the customer. But that happy or sadly end depends on Customer Service, Advertising, Sales process (E2E), delivery process, Pricing, perceived quality. In this system, the experience is digital, non-digital, emotional, and physical.

What a supreme experience for the customer who suffers from a flat tire at 2 am, stops his car, takes out his mobile phone, buys a new pair of tires (let`s suppose a full change for the flat tire and its pair) and in a matter of 30 minutes plus his car has a pair of new tires and the man is heading home. All of this because the tire dealer move as fast as the help message and the buying order was received and deliver a pair of new tires and besides its delivery service also helped to remove the old tires and installed the new ones at no cost.

The classical Customer Experience journey starts with a human in need of something, material or virtual (product or service) and ends with a big smile or a frustrated son of Adam. But for service companies such TELCOS, Insurance Companies, FinTech Start Ups, Banks and others, the Customer Journey is not just a mere journey is an entire life. Tradition is dead, those years when a Bank was like a tradition in families is no more. There`s a fierce fight in the Banks` Red Ocean, but fortunately there are chances to find blue waters through innovating services.

Now…yes, and what about Service Design. The key for success is to create seamless customer experiences that drive differentiation and long-term value. Let`s suppose UX is the Moon and CX the earth…Service Design (SD) would be something like a comet than shines into the night and affects both, the planet and the asteroid.  SD will complement the atrocities described for UX and CX.  SD deals with Consulting, Support, Education, Success, and Community.

Companies call themselves as customer centric ones; everything revolves around that tyrant, the customer. But wait, he is not the tyrant, he`s also the prey and salvation, yes! The loyal customer will let us increase revenue, gain market, develop new products among other things.  A proper design should be based on in-depth knowledge of the customer’s current and projected needs at the core; with all the activities, roles and processes aligned to enable smooth customer experience across all traceable points.  Services are the engine that power loyalty, retention, advocacy and, therefore, revenue growth.

Healthy habits include KPIs, benchmarking against competition, continuous improvement, research of the products and new ways of service selling.  The team for a successful SD becomes complex,. With marketing gurus, psychologists,  brand champions, Big Data analysts, etc.

Top advices on developing for effective User Experience in Banking

1. Practice some Design Thingking principles, think like your customer

Commonly, banks tend to design products using interfaces that are defined by bankers. They assume, wrongly, that users know about banks like professionals and also they try to mimic the obscure process in the user interface... guess what, users are common people that wants to be served fast and easy. So, keep calm and try to behave as a common mortal before designing any interface

2. Every application is different. Stop copying other interfaces' behavior and L&F.

Other misconception about applications and interfaces is to think like if a Size fits for All. Wrong! The behavior of a good application should fit the device that is managed by the user.  Some informational web sites are OK detecting how to fit in the device that is calling for them. But it is for information, period. Transactional applications need to adapt comfortably to the current device, but such automatic adaptability is far to be the best. So, there is the urgency of having a specific design for every device. And also kill the "Copycat" custom. Apply psychology and sociology principles.

If you like to mimic some other service or application from your competitors or referents, stop, think what are pros and cons, try to be original and evolutive.

3. UX is not cheap. You need specialized people in UX Banking and ... invest time!

The last move in this pasarela is being User Centric, and like in "Au Couture" you need specialized UX designers. Maybe a good UX designer can do the job, but there is also the time cost of try and error, or wireframes. Do not be afraid of using lots of resources like Brainstorming sessions, information gathering, prototypes, beta testers or users groups. Try using kids and old people for testing, go and ask your teen relatives.

4. Success do no to come just with a new User interface

Maybe this can sound rude, but nothing changes just painting that rotten car to have it running like a brand new one. The real change comes from inside your systems, new web services, security zones,  maybe some services in cloud, etc.  Think about everything. You can end up with dislikes in the App Store because your customers cannot register or the messages never arrive on time. UX is a matter of combining best of the best. I do not mean you need to invest in such top line software or hardware but to use efficiently your infrastructure and commit essential changes that make the difference of seconds to milliseconds in transaction response.

5. UX and CX is a matter of multidisciplinary teams, it is not just graphic design

Focus your mind in a new Ferrari Sport Car...very good looking outside and a real jewel inside. The jewel that moves that piece of engineering and design is not visible for the street passenger. Do you understand? You need people working on graphic design, other in user interaction, other ones in marketing research to understand which transactions are prone to error, which ones can make a difference, etc. For instance, unfortunately none of my banks have such an useful feature that allows me to interact with Siri, Cortana or Alexa and instruct the bank to execute the customary monthly money transfer to my old aunt. WOW!  Yes, a phrase can save me the torture of login, menu, etc. Do you see the difference.

You need to sum: User's opinion, bank's strategy, technical opinions, market research, innovation

6. Yes...be innovative

Old approach: traditional transactions such transfers,  account statements, checks balance...should be in my service.

Stop! think about mobile payments, wire transfers,  peer's loans. Yes, why no to provide your customers with services like peer to peer loans. If you do not implement services like that, any FinTech will and your customers will be running from your bank, but that is not what you want, do you?  Think about bankarization, there are people who do not use banks for a number of factors but they need to access the payment system. What if.....

I hope your efforts in UX and CX will make a difference in the World not just in your country.

exploiting the big data

Let's visit the Marketplace, data comes from everywhere, Social Networks, Telcos,  Retail expenses,  clothing preferences, education records, Uber rides, Foursquare check ins and likes,  Airbnb reservations due leisure or work. Just to name a few and we can go further, ATM's visits than can trace the geographic area of our customer influence.

We can predict customer expenses based on consumption habits, as we can geotag we can also be like credit card cops, simply detecting the customer's current location and credit card current debit place.
Even we could predict cash usage, not difficult at all. But What can we do with this humongous-information.
The first approach to create really disruptive services that can compete with quite focused FinTech ones is to understand what the customer wants, what is he used to do.
 No matter if we deal with millenials or Baby Boomers, customers have specific behaviors, they left their tracks, and Big Data with her friends IA, Analytic engines, etc, is able to show us the right path for deploying business.

Yes, you can name other actors such Blockchain, but this in the end is a technology not a business model. In Telco´s words: We need to fight back Churn. Why out customers are leaving for FinTech services. When Uber hit the market, it was clear that a flexible payment channel should be his spine for offering its service, now Uber´s customer can use Paypal or Credit Cards. What about the unbanked? How one of them could effectively access services such Airbnb, or Online stores.

A few years back, companies were crazy about BI, deploying complex boards to check for its data, transformed in bars and curves. Then the Big Data explosion comes to scene changing some variables but the Control Panel is still here with new visualization tools. Just that the Control Panel needs fresh ideas, something to push the data mining to undiscovered universes.

We have data: Knowledge, we have the Blue Ocean ahead, the first one to hit will hit harder and will establish models and needs. The human being tends to gets  accustomed to comfort, for us any discomfort creates an obnoxious experience. That`s why Data processing should help to offer better experiences.

Once and for all, financial services should abandon the brick and  mortar and traditional web models, try to use mobile devices, IoT, explode the gray internet and obscure data, transform services such transportation to implement revolutionary services. On the other hand redefine complex processes and study new ways of securing information.

Turn to new technologies and players, yes it is fair, but getting advantage of data.

Staying ahead with the right SEO for Mobile

The use of mobile devices is, as everybody knows, in a stunning rampant growth, New devices are launched by giants as Apple, Samsung, HTC and others and users are avid buyers of fresh technology. But users want the right content displayed in their fancy and expensive mobiles, if they do not find the right content or service they are always eager to switch for the service provider that fulfill their needs.

Users are looking for information in internet before buying or signing for services, they use more and more its current location to searching for physical places or to reach services (taxis for example). Back in 2010, Google started to offer Places, by using such service local business can be present in internet even without a web page. If small business can be present and be able to be reached by thousands of web navigators, what is happening with banks? Even the Rockies can use internet tools to sell services or products at low cost,  so are doing stablished brands too. But there are some customers’ requirements that are yet to be fulfilled, for instance enable your position sharing in your mobile and ask for your bank agencies near you. What happened? Did you got a flat results page or maps with flags to identify the nearest branch?

Searching from mobiles?

Yes, you search from your mobile and what the heck!  A lot of searching comes from such devices and revenue from mobile searching is increasing.  At this point in the life, a lot of banks have changed their web sites interfaces to be mobile friendly. But there are still web pages using Flash and Jscript in ways that are not usable in mobile phones. Content is sometimes impossible to reach, other there are pages that offer a frustrating user experience and this list of problems is lengthy.

Anyway, other factor to consider when you think about mobiles and your site is the possibility that web search engines can find your mobile site formatting useful.  I am talking about SEO for mobiles, specifically for banks. No doubt that this is also applicable to other business as well.  Think that if you already have a good positioning for traditional search you should be good at mobile searches.

Have you heard about transcoding from mobile search engines, if not this one is for you. Mobile Robots are quite specifics to search “mobile sites” , such spiders do additional analysis to be sure that the found site behaves adaptively to mobile devices. If engine find that the site’s content is not very trustful at showing its content they transcode the site when users click or tap on the link. Transcoding means that the site is shown using a formatting that is “guaranteed” to be displayed at mobiles. I have included in this link the test for nba.com, using Google Mobilizer for you to see how a good transcoded page looks like, or just point to http://www.google.com/gwt/n enter your web address and check to see if you like how you site looks.

Sadly, I found that a lot of banks are years behind top technical directives, they should check that their sites are “Mobile”, that is sites that are completely viewable from mobile devices.  New mobile applications like Square Cash use minimalist interfaces, but that is not always the case of institutional web sites.  There are heavy tasks to execute to assure that your mobile site is really mobile, luckily we can have a short list of them: 

1.       Try using just HTML5. Get rid of JavaScript , Flash or other proprietary formats that can be showed in mobile devices

2.       If your pages are slow at loading or have those automatic refreshing features, do extensive optimization.

You have a growing number of mobile users

Probably starting from you, you check for web content that comes from different sources, one of them is your bank.  Do you know what are looking for your mobile customers? What is the star product in your mobile world?