I am intrigued by the communication status of STRATEGY in large organisations. Is the defualt to keep the STRATEGY as private as possible so that only the generals at the top of the organisation know the intricacies of it? Is the STRATEGY then abstracted to differeing levels as it passes down the hierachy? Is the pinnacle of that abstraction what is published on the corporate website? A pithy set of statements oft described as the mission statement or purpose?
I get confused by this process. There are elements and goals of STRATEGY that of course must remain private e.g. sales/purchases of businesses, redundancies etc. but is the default of the strategy to keep as much as possible private to maintain STRATEGIC advantage over competitors? Or is this default privacy setting to ensure the vagueness can be used as a way of saying we are still on track when things go a little awry? Are there differing types of STRATEGY that could be treated differently? e.g a Digital STRATEGY? An internal collaboration STRATEGY? A social STRATEGY?
I think the problem with these appraoches is that the strategy becomes so secret that not enough of a large organisation know what it actually means, what directon they are heading, what impact it has on the day to day and more importantly the day tomorrow.
What if large organisations published their STRATEGIES? Made them open to every member of staff? To every customer? To everyone.
I have worked for a bank for the best part of two decades but I am still rubbish with managing my money.
I have zero control or comprehension of where I am with my money day today let alone a longer term view with regards to things like pensions or mortgage pay off dates or my children’s university funds.
It is the day-to-day management of family household expenditure that is of most concern today. I am in a situation where we have a decent size mortgage, two young children, two salaries coming in and all the financial management that entails. What we are lacking are the tools, products and services to help. Somewhere a tiny violin plays.
We manage today using a series of accounts. One joint, two personal, a separate shopping account and we also have separate credit cards for petrol and just in case scenarios and we have one with a lump of debt on. I also have a credit card for work expenses which is automatically paid off at the end of each month (whether I have claimed my expenses back or not). All those products are provided by four different institutions and operated by two people (God knows what I will do when my kids have accounts).
We use these products as virtual biscuit tins to put hard(ish) limits on our spending. To break it own into manageable chunks of household outgoings, weekly shopping and personal expenditure. It works fairly well but it has taken is some experimentation and mistakes to get to fairly well i.e. The use of easily available credit without decent controls meant more debt. It is far from perfect and it really should not be like this.
Personal Financial Financial Management tools are not that prevalent in the UK at the moment for a number of reasons, mainly the ease of access to transaction data. Those tools would help to some degree but I have yet to see a bank implement one with these kinds of hard spending limitations. They have soft budgeting capabilities ‘oops you have gone 14% over your flat white budget this month you silly sausage’. Which might be useful to some (coffee drinking morons) but they give no sense of being really skint i.e. I physically only have this money to spend. For all the digital advancements today no one has really cracked the USP of cash, once you have spent what you physically have on you it is gone.
There are solutions more targeted to the underbanked and financially excluded such as prepaid cards and the likes of Amex Serve in the US but again they are also not prevalent in the UK. It feels like to me we have a very blunt set of basic products; The Current Account, The Debit Card, The Credit Card and The Savings Account. The basic tool set for the vast amount of people’s day to day financial needs.
I believe that thee setting free of transaction data will herald a new beginning, especially in the UK, and I applaud the governments focus on opening up APIs for all. (Get your responses in on that by the way). Clearly the data only allows you to go so far and what is really needed is a rethink and some bloody good design into what the basic tools of finance could become. Software is eating the world so they say but it has not really taken a nibble at the basics. It is just adding layers on top of the data e.g. soft budget target.
How can you engineer hard stops on spending? How can you make those budget targets really mean something. How can I get to the till in the supermarket and be filled with a sense of dread that I can’t afford this weeks Aldi shop? Across different products and institutions?
Some institutions have savings goals and saving pots i.e. logical splits of a single savings account. What about these for credit? A shopping biscuit tin. Hard limits for the week. Differing credit limits for differing pots which can be raised and lowered as need be.
These kind of biscuit tins would need to be understood by the network, the myriad of merchants and schemes. Today they would be hacked to create virtual cards or accounts and they bring about real complexity and push the boundaries of a system built on things like branch sort codes, linking money to physical spaces that may no longer actually exist.
This is a very rich seam, I have only scratched the surface of the singular products but what about them working in conjunction? What about different levels of control for different people i.e. family members. The accounts as software, allowing them to be programmed and played with.
Until we see a fundamental change to the basic tools of finance then I am not sure true control over the day-to-day spending of most folk is ever going to be well understood or feel like it is in control. Maybe this is just me being rubbish with money, looking for digital brilliance to save me from my laziness. The organisation that can help relieve the feeling of barely keeping my head above water will have earned a fantastic amount of loyalty. It is hard to swim carrying all these tins.
I want to write more in 2015. I would also like to try a bit of that working out loud type stuff. Inspired by the brilliant Alex Deschamps-Sonsino I have copied her end of year review questions (Which I believe were created by Molly Steenson) and written some answers.
1. What did you do in 2014 that you’d never done before?
Travel to Hong Kong. Travelled business class. Drank beer at a bar in a plane. I did some ‘teaching’ at work. Left a suitcase on the tube like a knob head.
2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Not really and yes. Better to have tried and failed than not tried at all or something grandiose sounding that absolves my laziness/weakness at habit forming/breaking
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
No.
4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.
5. What countries did you visit?
Hong Kong, India, Dubai (airport), France, Wales.
6. What would you like to have in 2015 that you lacked in 2014?
A greater sense of focus, purpose and a promotion.
7. What date from 2014 will remain etched upon your memory?
December 12th
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
The teaching thing. I had to produce and deliver materials to teach very technically gifted employees about innovation and creativity. Properly dauntingly talented people PhD’s, scientists from CERN etc. and me with an HND in Business Information Technology from Sheffield Hallam. It went well though, the feedback was great and I got to visit Hong Kong, India and London to deliver my reckons.
I must also mention the War Cards. An idea of mine from last year that came to fruition thanks to the brilliant work of one of my colleagues. It gave me A real sense of pride.
Not making enough of the teaching opportunity (and others) that it would have been recognised as more of an achievement by others.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
After a painful 2013 thankfully not.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
Can’t remember anything of note I bought for myself. Best purchase for others was a £7 LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary book for my four year old son. He loves it.
12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Malala Yousafzai. The Daily Show interview.
13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Some people that shall remain nameless.
The UKIP and all their supporters.
Ched Evans’ PR advisors (as well as Ched himself).
Idiotic American gun owners.
Power crazed men in Russia/Ukraine, Middle East, Africa etc.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Mortgage payments.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Not enough. I did enjoy travelling a lot. I also really enjoyed my sons getting into LEGO and Star Wars. Having our first child free weekend at home in over four years another highlight.
16. What song/album will always remind you of 2014?
Todd Terje – Strandbar.
East India Youth – Hinterland.
One of the few gigs I went was to see Slow Club at The Leadmill as part of The Tramlines festival. They basically played there new album which I had heard nothing of but thought it was brilliant on the night. Repeat listenings have proved I was right.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
Wiser from my mistakes and determined to get better.
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Writing. It is like I have shut off part of my brain, and there is not much to shut off. A thing I must revive in 2015 starting with this.
The Circle & Ready Player One. Both a bit silly but fun.
Best business book by a mile was Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull about how Pixar became Pixar.
27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The previously mentioned East India Youth and Todd Terje. Also GoGo penguin.
28. What did you want and get?
I really can’t think of anything. I need to start being more selfish and wanting some stuff. Set more goals and shit. Although I did want some help this year and there were some really helpful people who gave me some. Those guys were brilliant.
29. What did you want and not get?
My children to sleep more.
30. What were your favourite films of this year?
Snowpiercer, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Edge of Tomorrow…
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I am 38 and I had to ask my significant other to remind me what I had done and she could not remember either. Clearly it was not that memorable/my memory is fading in ‘old age’. Must have a better 39th birthday celebration.
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Did I mention a promotion? Or being able to get my children to sleep? or eat? Or do anything I ask them?
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2014?
What ever was in my wardrobe and fitted. Probably a checked shirt and jeans.
34. What kept you sane?
My beautiful and patient significant other.
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
No one springs to mind. I quite like comedienne Sara Pascoe, mainly because she is very funny and strikes me as being particularly
intelligent, which is clearly hot.
36. What political issue stirred you the most?
My continued despair at my own disinterest in UK politics. What a bunch of pricks we have as political party leaders. My local MP is Nick Clegg. I have nothing to vote for.
37. Who did you miss?
No one springs to mind.
38. Who was the best new person you met?
Same answer as the last question. Both answers are a real shame.
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2014.
Misplaced loyalty makes you feel like a dog.
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?
‘Bass, how low can you go?’
That was really difficult but I found it useful. I did not have a great 2014. I wonder how next years answers will differ knowing I will be asking myself the same questions again? Will I take more notes because I can’t remember enough? Will I try and do more exciting things?
Let’s see if I can kick start a more frequent writing habit. New Year’s resolution number one.
Is a millennial someone who has survived for a thousand years? Is it someone beamed to earth on the 31st of December 1999? A person who was born after the release of the awful Robbie Williams album Millennium? Or the bogeyman for banking?
The word millennial It is bandied around willy nilly by people who mostly don’t fit into its vague definition. It is used as the threat that faces banks today ‘build services fit for the digital world or the millennials will leave and avoid you‘. It has more definitions than cloud computing and look how well understood and abused that vaporous vernacular is.
‘Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.‘
I say clears it up, it says that they might be people born 20 years apart. Do you like being put into segmented pots with people two decades older than you? My parents are just over two decades older than me.
Another thing which irks me is that there never seems to be reference to any country of residence or birth. The term (and it’s oft used partner in crime Generation Y) seems to have originated from the US, not a nation renowned for its geographic knowledge or consideration *cough* World Series *cough*.
It seems to me that a millennial is a person of unknown origin, upbringing, sex, religion, race, profession who may have been born between 1980 and 2000 but they know loads about technology and we need to build digital services to meet their unquenchable thirst for realtime, anywhere access and control.
Why are they so important? Is it because they are wealthy? Is it because they are the biggest market segment? Is it because they are young (depending on your application the millenial age range) and cool? I have no idea why they are so desired and so important.
I think my main annoyance is that these mythical and ill defined people (actually have we confirmed they are humans?) are seemingly used to inform strategies and designs for financial services products and services (and so much more). They are the straw men (gender?) used to sell the need for digital services fit for the brave new world populated just by the millennials. I know marketing has worked like this for decades but it does not make it any less annoying to someone who does not understand it’s seemingly mythical ways.
Does this take us down a path where we are designing for these people who don’t exist? Are we distracted by thoughts of ‘Will the millennials like this? Will it make us look attractive to the millennials?’. Is it marketing campaign targeting segmentation applied to far more than it should be?
Should we be so focused on them at all? I mean are they really that important? Great opening paragraph from this Guardian article
Falling birthrates and the lengthening lives of baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 produce an extraordinary statistic. On current trends, from now until 2037, while the numbers of those aged 15 to 64 in the UK will grow on average by 29,000 a year, the numbers of people aged 65 and over will rise by 278,800 a year, according to the thinktank International Longevity Centre – UK.
Is the iPhone or iPad a device for millennials? Ever seen an 18 month old or an 80 year old use one? iOS and its partnering touch based hardware interfaces has taken away the computing from computing. It has democratised access and understanding for all ages. Banking should focus on that not such an ill defined subset of people.
I will tell you what I reckon millennials want. They want the same things as all human beings. Really bloody good product, service and interface design. Accessible by and built for all. Yes there are behaviours and features that some generations and personality types and backgrounds might desire or partake in more readily but get the main things right please. I am not saying all segmentation and research is pointless. I am just saying overusing its divisions and taking it at such a simplistic level and then applying it so widely renders it meaningless.
The bottom line is banking is about spending, lending, saving, investing the easier to perform, understand and build upon those things the more financial services will be suitable for the next millennia for each and every lazy market segment definition.
In the same way that Salesforce commoditised CRM I often wonder what if they did the same to core banking. If they built a set of banking services that ran on the exact same platform as their CRM solution and could use the ecosystem that has built up around it. What would a bank pretty much entirely powered by and run on the Salesforce platform look like?
In June last year Salesforce and Oracle announced a strategic partnership which caught my eye. It was a mixture of we will use your stuff and you can use ours. Oracle do have a core banking solution and I wondered how tightly that could be integrated into Salesforce. Alternatively what if Salesforce built one from the ground up?
Salesforce already have payroll, payments and accounting capabilities. They already integrate into financial services and systems in a number of areas but could they go further? They would of course need banking and money transmission licenses for the markets they wanted to operate in. We would also need to see moves by the regulator to approve Salesforce infrastructure. In the Netherlands last year we saw Amazon Web Services gain approval for usage in financial services so no reason why Salesforce could not have approved bank grade data centres and services.
The term bank in a box get bandied about in all kinds of places (well the dull ones I oft inhabit) Salesforce could be the first company to really achieve that and all in the cloud. Not bank in a box, which harks back to the days of software installs but bank in the cloud, which looks to the misty ill-defined future.
I am sure Mr Benioff is all over this, if not my consultancy and reckon services are available for a very competitve license fee.
UPDATE 17/03/2015. Looks like they are making a few moves in this direction. Invested in nCino a newish bank software platform built on you know what.
Following on from a spectacularly successfulPR campaign the social network Ello was the hot new startup bouncing round the echo chamber. The thing that made them different was that they would not do any of that naughty data sales and manipulation stuff that sites like Facebook do. All very laudable but how would they make money? And more importantly why would the masses leave the social networks that do the rest of the stuff (bar privacy it seems) better than Ello do today?
I am a fan of any attempts by a business to be upfront with how it intends to make money. We have been here before with the likes of Diaspora and App.net and others and they all have ultimately failed to become anything like a mainstream success. Not a major issue of course but if these privacy aims are to be copied by the larger networks there needs to be financial success as well I suspect.
These sites need to solve a problem that has not already been solved or provide functionality far above that what is already available today along with privacy levels we all deserve. Easy.
But.
What if we saw a different kind of transparency? We want to make money and this is how we are going to do it and anything we choose to do we will run by you before doing it. Yes we will sell your data, in this way and to these people and we will also make it available to you in the same form, We will invite the marketers to descend etc. Can transparency and more seemingly realistic business models be harmonious or would people hate all the evil marketing focused money making stuff that people would never agree to any of the changes? Smart value exchange for the business models used, micro stock holding based on value to the network etc. etc.
Also what about more radical modes of transparency. I am a big fan of the way Buffer App is open with everything from their burn rate to their salaries. What does a fully transparent social network/web company look like?
In the banking world we have seen a few transparent business models. Barclaycard Ring, a community based credit card with very transparent trading practices (such a shame that it is only live in the US at the moment. Triodos bank is very open and honest about it’s lending practices. In the past Caixa Bank in Spain famously told customers how much profit they made from them and allowed them to invest a portion of that in local charities and social enterprises.
There clearly needs to be a strong mixture of ethics and design to succeed. I don’t think it can be just enough to say we won’t do anything bad with your data or money these companies must obviously also be better in other ways than the companies they wish to disrupt or differentiate themselves from. I wish Ello luck but I think we all know how this story ends. I hope that people keep trying to be as transparent as possible in business, especially banking, but I also hope they can make better services and products that match their ethical aims.
*I was beaten to the punch with this title by the fantastic author Warren Ellis. I stuck with it because it fitted well with my reckons. Here is his article which is clearly much better written as he is an author etc.
Death to the branch and all who reside and rely upon them. Now clearly I am a digital by default kind of person but branch bashing is tiresome. Mainly as it is done by those that don’t have that infrastructure so they want to level the playing field. But I believe banks give up infrastructure at their peril. The branch as we know it today might be driven to the brink of extinction by the continued rise of mobile…
But, like Riepls law posits, some forms of media never die…
Reipl’s law actually states (translated)
‘further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms’
Clearly branches will morph and flux due to the continued rise of digital. Their size and function and form will of course change. In some cases of proposed media death you see a resurgence and a move to the premium. Vinyl being the classic example. TV never killed the radio. Tablets will never kill the TV. Wearables will not kill mobiles. Mobiles may never kill branches…they may seriously wound them though.
This reckon assumes that people love branches the same way the love vinyl…perhaps not but there are still a number of financial services that benefit from human face to face service.
Yeah but Amazon killed Barnes & Noble, iTunes killed HMV, Netflix killed Blockbuster etc. but they were all media and the distribution model is what changed, do services differ? Expedia killed the travel agent is the a fairly obvious parallel but travel agents still cling onto the high street. We have seen the rise of the premium and tailored players such as Kuoni. It seems people like getting help from smart people who know their stuff. Solutions tailored to their needs etc. Obvious really.
There are many opportunities to experiment with the branch at all ends of the spectrum. The premium end being the most obvious for an influx of some theatre and grandeur which could lead to a wonderful experience. Then mass market may be trickier to justify on cost alone but can the value of the branch be measured on cost alone? Many have tried before to improve the branch and they will try again. Good luck to them, ignore the naysayers, yes make digital amazing but don’t go throwing away those important pieces of infrastructures just yet.
I went to an API conference last week and someone showed this slide which had a fairly obvious spelling mistake. People in our industry often bang on about frictionless and seamless in regards to payments and banking but I don’t often see someone asking for the removal of fiction. Maybe payments and banking would be improved greatly by the removal of some fiction rather than friction.
Today I used the Events feature in Dropbox for the first time. It is a nice simple feature that simply shows all actions undertaken by you and others on your Dropbox account.
I have wanted something similar like this to exist for banking for years. It could show more than just transactions such as details of calls to and from the bank, progress of applications, mail sent etc. etc. not only would it be a good record of more of your ‘relationship’ with your bank it would also be a good source of notification / event type material that could power your taptic engine etc. I have talked about this kind of the stuff in the past.
WOOOOOOOO AAAAPPPPPLLLLLE PAYMENTS ARE NEARLY HERE. Apple seem to have screwed down their partners to get maximum value from all sides of the deal, years of iWallet patents are ready to spew forth into the public conscience and take over the payments world, a beauty parade of top line merchants are ready to show off and launch a set of use cases for rich people and we might even see a payment capable wearable. WOOOO, WOOOO and thrice WOOOO.
My question is this…
Do Apple wait until the moons are fully aligned (moons = every piece of the business model and technology puzzle) or do they actually measure and judge their new launches based on the levels of fervency they expect them to reach? If they don’t score highly on the Fervency Scale their launch is delayed another year? My bored train journey mind likes to think of the latter when obviously it is the former. Here is my even lazier scribble of the Apple Fervency Metric Chart (good luck reading my handwriting)
Last year it was all about the Touch ID, a piece of infrastructure that made payments potentially a possibility perhaps and a cheaper model expanding the Apple ecosystem to even the poorest of folks i.e. rich. The year before that it was all about a bigger form factor (much the same as one of this year’s key themes). This year is the fervency scale right? Will the launch of payments have free reign and not be dwarfed by other meagre feature adds (or a broken aerials)? Can they tie all those previously launched pieces together? Coupled with the launch of a wearable that might have NFC and enable payments without distracting you from looking at your screen, will it break the fervency scale?
I don’t know but I do know that on September the 9th at 6pm Greenwich Mean, 10am Pacific the fervency metric will be pretty near the top of my silly chart. Also the mythical Apple folk that score their new releases by this mythical measurement will be classed by their new iWatch as hyperactive near death via euphoria. Will the public reaction in usage be the same? Time will tell…or the device that historically told the time will tell.
