Humanising finance: how to survive finance when all the cogs are moving
If the noise of fintech, innovation and disruption threatens to overwhelm your focus, here are some lessons from the 2017 Innovate Finance Global Summit that should serve as a reminder that standing still is the new going backwards, and staying light on your feet is more important than just what’s on your to-do list today.
Money talks: how can we keep going in the financial services world
It’s not banks that will drive the need for innovation, it's organisations outside the financial services industry that will make it change. We can see it already with Uber. Batch processing is as old as the hills, and has been the staple diet of clearing banks for years… until Uber came along. The need to facilitate small, on-demand, instant payments from personal accounts to Uber drivers, every time a ride concluded, promptly booted batch processing off the side of the hill.
Then there’s big business. It won’t be long before global giants such as Amazon step in to create a layer between the customer and the bank, adding yet another wedge in between you and your customer relationships.
As Simon Sinek enthuses – it’s those that aim to stay in the game (i.e. long-term survival) that succeed in business, not the ones trying to win (i.e. short-term gains). It’s never the players you think you’re in competition with that will pull the rug from under you, it’s the players that haven’t even entered the game yet.
We need to switch the vision from our customers to all customers to offer genuinely great customer experience, because the reality is your customers already have their finances in all your competitors’ pots; a current account here, a mortgage there, a slush fund in here, a pension in there. And they’ll allocate funds for new pots as they arise; peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding, self-managed investments and maybe some bitcoin for fun.
So, what’s the antidote? To come back to a true sense of purpose. To carve out a more meaningful path to galvanise your employees towards a vision, where working together with compliance we can find better ways to serve customers, both with products they genuinely need and services that re-establish trust. Where business is a force for good, driving record profits as the result, not the objective.
Recognition that the customer will always be the winner in the fintech generation will support the realisation that you’re not an island, and collaborating with and giving back to your communities is imperative for survival. And fundamentally protecting the planet for the future generations.
The payments industry was the catalyst for unprecedented change in finance, and platform innovation has been plentiful. Yet we stand today at the altars of a new era, where it’s not just about using the same plumbing for better experience, it’s about better plumbing. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible, so trying to prepare for change simply isn’t going to work.
It’s time to come back to a human approach to business. It’s time to #jointhehumanrace. Hear from Aviva, Co-op Bank,Virgin Money, Metro Bank, Funding Circle, Just, Squirrel, Profile Pensions, Bankable and RightIndem in our latest research into what makes a human brand in finance, and why it’s winning as the driver of sustainable growth and record revenues.
Claire Van der Zant is business development director at Rooster Punk.