The Better Banking Blog is a great read if you're interested in forward thinking about better banking and banking services.
I liked this post about community involvement in product and service development, and opening up the banking platform to mashups.
Can you imagine if a bank opened up development in such a way? What if customers could design their own widgets for desktop banking using your Internet banking platform? How about the capability to set up a mobile banking tool that brings in transactions from all your bank accounts? Again, it’s already happening, albeit without the permission of the bank and security issues being addressed.
In fact, as they point out, this may become a competitive necessity in Australia as competition is able to enter the payments and funds transfer business, which was previously restricted.
There's an obvious strategic role for social media, which is one of the points of my comment on that post. Brand promises are becoming worthless and in fact negative in the face of brand depth which fails - fails to deliver the promise and social media accelerates this failure through connectivity and transparency.
Utilising social media strategically to gain transparency, customer insights, and engagement is going to become a necessity over time. Although I'm not holding my breath that it will happen soon in Australia for banks per se as there is low competition and little incentive - but in financial services there are many opportunities.
- You can read here about the American Express Open Forum and some of their tactics.
In the social media world Wells Fargo is often quoted as a banking leader, and no doubt they are as they are doing more than twittering for sure. I'm not up with the best examples, but you might be interested to read some of the comments on this Wells Fargo blog post which are less than complimentary and show how well the whole effort has to be coordinated in a complex organisation.
I'm glad it demonstrates this mayhem as it brings home that social media "strategy" is not just some clever campaign from an Agency. It takes a thorough assessment and sound business-like methodologies to create the strategy, and to execute, monitor, measure and improve it.
I enjoyed reading many of the posts on Better Banking and pleasantly surprised to see the forward view and progressive thinking in a sector not renown for such.
