Mobile Channel Focus Day at Net.Finance Conference

As I'm watching the tweets from the Mobile Banking and Emerging Applications Summit in New Orleans this week, it prompted me to highlight some of my impressions from the Mobile Channel Focus Day at Net.Finance back in May. Here are a few of the highlights:

Jeff Dennes, SVP Chief Digital Officer of Huntington National Bank (and formerly with USAA), gave the Keynote address. His presentation was full of interesting observations including:

• The economics of Mobile are compelling. Mobile transactions cost $.08 per transaction versus a branch cost of $4.00 per transaction.




• The expansion of the 4G network over the next 2 years will increase bandwidth equal to a cable modem at home.




• Mobility is driving convergence. The gap between the traditional web and related services is closing, with the increase in smart phones and the movement of the Gen Y's into the workforce.

Secil Tabli Watson, SVP of Internet and Mobile Banking from Wells Fargo discussed using ethnographic data to determine how and when customers are using their mobile services.The results will identified "convenience" as the driver of adoption and use. This will ultimately help them focus future enhancements around this approach.

Jennifer Wilson, SVP Internet Channel Director, BBVA Compass shared her experience with the introduction of ZashPay, a Person to Person payments service from Fiserv. From an adoption perspective, they found that building a web page with a simple enrollment process was key. When they looked at the user base, they found a surprising number of small business customers who were using as an alternative to more expensive ACH services. Given these pilot results, they may develop a mobile invoicing service for their business customers.

Mobile continues to be a hot topic among financial services providers and may prove to be the most signficant game changer in the next couple of years.

Notes from Net.Finance- Personal Financial Management (PFM)

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Net.Finance Conference in Chicago. It is, by far, one of the best conferences for those of us focused on the digital channels of financial services. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing about some of the main themes from the conference.
When I was there, I was fortunate enough to be part of a panel discussion on Personal Financial Management (PFM) along with Patrick Smith of Wells Fargo, Eric Connors of Yodlee, and Edward Chang of Strands.
We had a lively discussion about the benefits of PFM for our customers, the challenges of getting people to use it, and the pros and con's of aggregation services. While the benefits are pretty clear (better financial management) the biggest challenge, as noted by Patrick, is inertia. Managing your finances is certainly important, but not critical. Setting up goals and budgets falls somewhere around cleaning out the gutters on the "to do" list. The key, perhaps, is to help educate the consumers about the benefits to make it move up that list.
One of the classic differences between my organization, a smaller community bank, and Wells is the approach to aggregation. Wells provides tools that help manage those accounts that are with Wells while we offer a service to add all your accounts, even from other institutions. Perhaps this highlights the major difference between big and small banks. We see this as a service that is the right thing for the customer, while they look at it from an internal perspective of what is right for the organization. We (of course) think ours is the better approach.