Mobile Banking and Customer Behavior

There have been a number of recent articles and studies focusing on customer behavior and mobile banking. The most recent was in the American Banker entitled"Tech-Savvy Crowd Demands More Personal Service from Banks, Not Less". (By the way, you've gotta love any article that uses the term Luddite)It suggests that increased mobile use by customers may not translate into decreased branch traffic and less phone calls. My question is: Who said it would?

As my friend Ron Shevlin noted on his blog, Marketing Tea Party, the mobile channel is so new, "it doesn't exist for the vast majority of customers." Given the limited adoption (much less banks offering the service), how can anyone make any inferences about how it will impact FI's and their customers?

Our organization rolled out a mobile about eight months ago. It wasn't in the hope that it would offset any costs by reducing interactions in other channels. It's about customer convenience and acknowledging the ubiquitous nature of mobile devices across all generations. Perhaps some services will, in fact, reduce bank visits. The depositing of checks through your mobile device would certainly qualify as one example. Until there is mass adoption of the technology, mobile is just another channel for our customers to use. No more, no less.

Eight Tracks, The Dead, Banking, and Technology

As I sit here listening to a streaming audio of the soundboard recording of a Grateful Dead concert I attended in high school, it reminds me of how much technology has changed since then. I first heard the song "Mexicali Blues" on my Eight Track Player in my room. Remember those things? Eventually, if you played the tape enough (which I usually did), you'd start hearing other tracks bleeding into the song you were listening to. Pretty lousy technology, in retrospect.

Okay, so what does that have in common with banking? I've just spent twelve days over the last four weeks with a team of folks looking at bank technology vendors. So technology and the progress we've made as an industry is front and center. While we've made tremendous strides since our bank last looked at a new core provider over 11 years ago, we are still living with many systems that were built during the height of the Eight Track era. Now it isn't only the core data that's critical (just like the music), it's how it is delivered to the end customer (streaming on demand versus an Eight Track Cassette).

I think I like the current "on demand" era better, but it sure does make it a more difficult decision. Frankly, we have to evaluate our partners even more closely to see if they are thinking about the next, new thing that will replace the current channels. Because the technology today, like the Eight Track Cassette, may not be the long term solution tomorrow.