A few years ago, I had the opportunity to help design a bank focused on customer service–from the ground up, and we took an all-encompassing approach. We considered it in the products and services we developed, the systems we purchased, our philosophies and mgmt style, our policies and procedures, the people we hired, our brochures, our marketing, our check cashing, our hours, etc. It was huge and very successful.

Another issue you should think about is your employees. To make banking easier, you have to have the full commitment from your employees. Long-time employees get wrapped up in the way it’s always been done. I have always liked challenging the status quo, and I can tell you that people get very touchy when you ask why. So, you can’t forge the internal/cultural challenges. BankSimple will have an advantage on that because they’re starting from scratch and can hire people who support the concept and don’t have to protect their tasks (i.e.job security).

Great post on several accounts. Thanks for the reality check for those of us embarking down this path. Also, hat tip to Elaine for the reference to the grade level calc in Word. Hadn’t used this before. By the way, this article is a respectable grade 8.2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test

And yes, it’s complicated — sometimes inherently, sometimes unnecessarily. I suppose the hard part is knowing which is which.

I don’t have a financial background, so the last three years as a credit union webmaster has been quite the education. Every industry that’s been around for a while has its own layers of complexity* which are hard for an insider to see. And any large institution has a certain inertia, change agents or no. What to do? I haven’t the foggiest; I just try to clarify in my own domain as much as I can.**

* Ask me about community college class scheduling! Or don’t, I might have a panic attack.

** I found the WA Governor’s Plain Talk Initiative refreshing & helpful. Also, I use the grade level calculator in Word on any big block of text: that pushes me towards shorter, more declarative sentences and short straightforward words.

Fraud and security concerns are another reason why banking may never be very simple, and maybe never should be.

Great assessment of what it takes to make banking simple – process, risk assessment and service capability is just as critical as underlying technology. If compliance procedures, poor customer analytics and clumsy marketing aren’t resolved, then no amount of sweet front-end UI capability will be able to reengineer the overall experience.

Brett King
Author – BANK 2.0