Is there a New World of Banking?
Speaking to bankers who are trying to deal either in proactive or reactive modes to social networking, three basic “feel trends” seem clear.
1. Changing demographics from Baby Boomers (pass book savers to high touch HNW customers) to aggressive, impatient late GenX, GenY and Millennial is frightening. It is not enough to tell them to blog, wiki, facebook…you know participate. That is too vague. They need hard advice like, passively defend your brand, engage your customer's outside your online channel and for goodness sake invest in an online channel that can address the 2', 10' (livingroom banking) and mobile experiences without separate code bases...can anyone say Silverlight?
2. They can no longer control their brand by brute force, they must project a brand, re-enforce it in all their channels and respond to complaint sites like <InsertBankName>sucks.com by engaging while passively defending themselves. Do not shoot the messenger…it will only backfire. Take the message and address it. If it is intractable, as so many are…write it off, literally (not like a loss) but in a response statement defending the bank with actions taken trying to address the problem.
3. With the democratization/digitization of money and the evolution of the payments space a huge opportunity to merge social networking, convergent payment methods, anonymous peer financial comparisons and merchant banking could create a virtuous payments lifecycle with rewards all around. Win, Win, Win. This opportunity is the “below the waterline” part of the iceberg.
Banks need to control what they can, their channel experiences. Make them as consistent as possible, update their web presence and introduce Web 2.0 technologies like chat, wiki and blog response to their strategy.
