Banks
It just occurred to me yesterday that I have never once had any communication from the CEO or president of the bank at which I do most of my banking. I’m not talking about a personal, two way communication here (I certainly don’t really expect, nor necessarily want to have a phone or email conversation with someone I don’t really know), but not once has the chief of strategy and business at my bank sent me even a form letter to let me know how things are going and what’s up.
When I travel Air Canada, I inevitably open up the En Route magazine tucked into each seat when I run out of my own reading material. Every month Montie Brewer, the CEO of Air Canada writes a column explaining what’s new, what may be coming in the future or why they are engaged in a particular strategy. While for example, I may not like Air Canada’s new pricing scheme, after reading his column, it was the first time I truly understood it. Keep in mind, this is not a blog, or anything fancy, just a simple attempt from the CEO to communicate to me, his customer.
The only banks where I have insight into their strategy are the one’s at which I am a shareholder (because in that case they do communicate with me via the quarterly and annual reports). The communication I get from my own bank is either regarding existing transactions or the selling/cross selling of a new product. I don’t really have a relationship with my bank when you think about it. Chequing accounts and credit cards are just commodity items.
Some banks are very good at data mining their customers’ information to identify cross selling opportunities. I think they call this Customer Relationship Management. What seems even more valuable than the large set of customer information they have is the large network of customers they have. Let’s forget for a moment about the senior management of a bank communicating to their clients about the bank. How about letting their customers communicate with each other? The bank may not want to do a second mortgage for one of their customers but maybe another customer would. The bank provides the network for making the deal happen and can also provide the transactional support to service the deal (e.g. handle the collection of payments of the second mortgage). The whole Wesabe-like experience should be provided by banks! Right now customers of a bank talk to each other outside of their bank. The bank doesn’t get to leverage that communication at all.
Note: I know this is not directly about payments, but let’s face it, banks are probably the biggest players in the payments industry. So what the heck.
