Takeaways from Brett King's Bank 2.0

This article is a companion to David Gerbino’s review of Brett King’s BANK 2.0: How Customer Behavior and Technology will Change the Future of Financial Services, by Brett King, Marshall Cavendish/Business, 397 pp., 2010. A link to the review appears at the end of this article.

Over the course of BANK 2.0’s nearly 400 pages, many great ideas for change or future enhancement for your institution are offered. The following are a few that I found interesting:

1. Revisit the relevance of your own bank’s website. As a researcher, I look at over a 100 websites of banks routinely. After reading “The problem with much of this (bank website content) is that the information is simply not relevant to the vast majority of visitors to your website.” This is true.

Don’t believe it? Compare your bank’s top 25 most-visited web pages versus the bottom 25 (not including special ads or promotions). When you see the numbers, you will understand what King means, and can begin the process of removing the unnecessary information from the site.

2. Migrate from “mass” marketing to “one-to-one” marketing. As an accomplished one-to-one marketer, there is nothing more frustrating to me than having my bank’s core and Internet banking provider not having the ability to use all the data you have about your customers and create an online one-to-one marketing offer that is relevant. King rightly points out on page 180 that “the marketing department is not normally given campaign access to the Internet banking portal, which needs to change as of today. However, more importantly, marketing needs to have the technical and process capability to make relevant offers.”

3. If you’re not into mobile, get moving. Chapter 6 is dedicated to mobile banking; the history, present, and future. For many, this may be the first chapter they read. The “Revenue and Savings Opportunities” section (page 221) shares a very interesting statistic about mobile banking: “...it is by far the lowest-cost bank channel on a per-transaction basis, averaging about 8 cents per transaction versus $4 for the branch and $3.75 for the call center.”

Just imagine the savings that your bank might achieve by moving your offline customers to online. A 98% savings is not bad. How many balance requests does your call center get a year? Imagine the savings if you could cut that in half with the available mobile solutions.

—David Gerbino, book reviewer and community banker

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