U.S. Bancorp emerged from the financial crisis as a desirable workplace for talented employees, enabling the bank to better attract and retain talented employees. In this presentation, Jennie Carlson, executive vice president of human resources, outlines U.S. Bancorp’s transparent and analytical process to identify, reward and engage top employees. Millennials are changing how banks groom the next level of executive talent, which includes an increased commitment to diversity.
Many banks today struggle with two concerns related to loyalty, both among customers and employees. Attracting and retaining talented employees, particularly among the younger and tech savvy set, remains difficult for many banks. Commanding customer loyalty is another key issue. What’s known as “gamification,” properly used, can help financial companies address these problems.
In practice, gamification uses techniques learned from video games to reward specific behaviors. Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox console has long rewarded players for their achievements, whether it’s completing a level in the popular Halo series or constructing a sword on Minecraft. A 2007 study by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, a video game research firm, found that game titles with a greater number of possible achievements sold more copies. It’s a tactic that can work for the banking industry, particularly those desperate to attract millennial employees and customers.
“‘Gamification’ is ultimately a very powerful methodology for increasing customer engagement and ‘stickiness’ to that institution,” says Michael Yeo, a Singapore-based senior market analyst with IDC Financial Insights.
San Antonio, Texas-based USAA is one financial services company that seems to have gone all-in. The bank’s Savings Coach app rewards members, who earn points and medals for completing challenges, like skipping trips to Starbucks, and transfers the money that would have been spent into a USAA savings account. The standalone app uses voice command technology, and features an animated eagle named Ace, which ties to the company’s logo and military membership. Ace provides bits of financial advice to users. “He’s sort of a stern-sounding dude who scans your transactions” to identify ways to save money, says Neff Hudson, vice president, emerging channels at USAA. Members have saved $400,000 so far through the app, which was introduced in July. In the near future, Hudson says members could earn rewards by using other USAA services, such as financial planning, that establish a more sound financial future for the customer.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that other examples from the world of video games abound in the fintech sector. New York City-based online investing platform Kapitall makes investing a game, where users can earn points by completing educational quests, participating in tournaments or playing investment-related games. These points can be redeemed for items in Kapitall’s online store. LendUp, an online lender based in San Francisco, rewards the good behavior of lessees that make payments on time or take education courses. Points earned by climbing “The LendUp Ladder” translate into a better rate for the borrower.
Similar to LendUp, mobile payment app PaySwag rewards good behavior among a consumer base that may lack good credit and has a greater need for financial education. PaySwag was developed by Reno, Nevada-based Customer Engagement Technologies. “What we’re trying to do is completely change the concept of collections, and build that around a combination of rewards, ‘gamification’ and…education, to help really minimize defaults and get rid of the negativity around collections,” says Max Haynes, the company’s CEO. Intended for high-risk borrowers who may struggle to make payments on time, the white label app partners with lenders and other entities involved in collecting debt. Users can earn points by watching educational videos or making payments on time. Those points translate into small rewards, like a $5 Amazon gift card. The program also allows some flexibility for the borrower to make changes to their payment plan. By using PaySwag, these organizations aim to establish good financial habits that help users avoid delinquencies—meaning PaySwag’s partners are paid on time. One auto lender saw serious delinquencies of more than 30 days drop by 50 percent over a one-year period, says Haynes.
USAA works with Badgeville, a Redwood City, California-based “gamification” solution provider. In addition to adding savings games for customers, USAA is in the early stages of using similar methods to better engage and motivate employees.
According to Karen Hsu, Badgeville’s vice president of marketing, the purpose is “to change behavior and motivate, really motivate people, and it’s to motivate to perform better year after year.” She says video game techniques can help speed up the onboarding process for new employees, and continue training and education efforts. Employees can provide each other with positive encouragement and real-time feedback, and earn points for answering a coworker’s question or sharing educational materials, like an article. “It’s hard to physically give everybody the time they need, and being able to give that instant feedback is really important,” says Hsu. Employees can also be encouraged to develop skills and expertise in certain areas, or to meet specific criteria that help the institution’s efforts to cross-sell products and services.
USAA has five projects in the works using video game methods, and more on the drawing board. “I really think we need to look at this as a set of tactics that can make the products that we offer our members and consumers better,” says Hudson. As expectations change to meet the demands of younger generations, “gamification” could provide a strategic advantage to banks creative enough to use it.
Traditional banks, which are typically run by baby boomers and older Gen X’ers, are still trying to figure out the next big generation of consumers.
Sixty percent of bank CEOs and directors responding to Bank Director’s 2015 Growth Strategy Survey, which was sponsored by the Vernon Hills, Illinois-based technology firm CDW, indicate that their bank may not be ready to serve millennials, which this year surpassed baby boomers as the largest segment of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. As digital use increases among an increasingly younger customer base, truly understanding and planning for the digital needs and wants of consumers seems to continue to elude bank boards: Seventy percent of bank directors admit that they don’t even use their own bank’s mobile channel.
Bank Director contacted chief executive officers, chairmen, independent directors and senior executives of U.S. banks with more than $250 million in assets, to examine industry trends regarding growth, profitability and technology. Responses were collected online and through the mail in May, June and July, from 168 bankers and board members.
Instead of millennials, banks have been finding most of their growth in loans to businesses and commercial real estate, which is their primary focus today. Loan volume was the primary driver of profitability over the past 12 months for the institutions of 88 percent of respondents, and the majority, at 82 percent, expect organic loan originations to drive future growth at their institutions over the next year. Eighty-five percent see opportunities for growth in commercial real estate lending, and 56 percent in commercial & industrial (C&I) lending. Total loans and leases for the nation’s banks grew 5.4 percent year over year, to $8.4 trillion in the first quarter 2015, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Despite the rise of nonbank competitors like Lending Club and Prosper in the consumer lending space, just 35 percent of respondents express concern that these startup companies will syphon loans from traditional banks. Just 6 percent see an opportunity to partner with these firms, and even fewer, 1 percent, currently partner with P2P lenders to expand their bank’s portfolio. Few respondents—13 percent—see consumer lending as a leading avenue for loan growth.
Other key findings:
I was sitting in a group discussion at Bank Director’s Chairman/CEO Peer Exchange earlier this year when the subject of the fast growing financial technology sector came up. That morning, we had all heard a presentation by Halle Benett, a managing director at the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in New York. The gist of Benett’s remarks was that conventional banks such as those in attendance had better pay attention to the swarm of fintech companies that are targeting some of their traditional product sectors like small business and debt consolidation loans.
The people in the room with me were mostly bank CEOs and non-executive board chairmen at community banks that had approximately $1 billion in assets, give or take a hundred million dollars. And I would sum up their reaction as something like this: “What, me worry?”
In one sense I could understand where they were coming from. Most of the participants represented banks that are focused on a core set of customers who look and act a lot like them, which is to say small business owners and professionals in their late forties, fifties and sixties. The great majority of community banks have branches, which means they also have retail customers, but their meat and potatoes are small business loans, often secured by commercial real estate, and real estate development and construction loans. I suspect there’s a common dynamic here that is shared across the community banking sector, where baby boomer and older Gen X bankers are doing business with other boomers and Gen X’ers, and for the most part they relate to each other pretty well.
There are two trends today that bear watching by every bank board, beginning with the emergence of financial technology companies in both the payments and lending spaces. The latter is the subject of an extensive special section in the current issue of Bank Director magazine. I believe the fintech trend is being driven in part by a growing acceptance—if not an outright preference—for doing business with companies—including banks and nonbank financial companies—in digital and mobile space. The fintech upstarts do business with their customers almost exclusively through a technical interface. There is no warm and fuzzy, face-to-face human interaction. Today, good customer service is as likely to be defined by smoothly functioning technology as by a smiling face on the other side of the counter.
The other trend that all banks need to pay attention to is the entry of millennials—those people who were born roughly between the early 1980s and early 2000s—into the economy. Millennials can be characterized by a number of characteristics and behaviors: they are ethnically diverse, burdened with school debt, late bloomers from a career/marriage/home ownership perspective and they generally are social media junkies. They are also digital natives who grew up with technology at the center of so many of their life experiences and are therefore quite comfortable with it. In fact, they may very well have a preference for digital and mobile channels over branches and ATMs. Although digital and mobile commerce have found widespread acceptance across a wide demographic spectrum, I would expect that the digital instincts of millennials will accelerate their popularity like the afterburner on a jet fighter.
Although they now outnumber boomers in the U.S. population, millennials are not yet a significant customer segment for most community banks. And the universe of fintech lenders is still too small to pose a serious market share threat to the banking industry. But both of these trends bear watching, especially as they become more intertwined in the future. The youngest boomers are in their early fifties. The cohort that follows, the Gen X’ers, is much smaller. Who will bankers be doing business with 10 years from now? Millennials, you say? But will millennials want to do business with bankers then if an increasing number of them are developing relationships with a wide variety of fintech companies now?
A board of directors has an obligation to govern its company not only for today, but for tomorrow as well. And these two trends, particularly in combination, have the potential to greatly impact the banking industry. Learning how to market to millennials today by focusing on their financial needs, and studying the fintech companies to see how community banks can adapt their technological advancements, is one way to prepare for a future that is already beginning to arrive.
For research on millennials and growth in banking, see Bank Director’s 2015 Growth Strategy Survey.
You can visit a lot of banks and never see one that looks like this.
Located in Portland, Oregon’s trendy Pearl District, Simple is one of the leading firms at the intersection of banking and technology.
The design is consciously industrial. Bike racks crowd every nook and cranny. There’s a piano. A sunroom. A large meeting room stocked with healthy snacks. The atmosphere is casual, yet charged with energy. The employees wear t-shirts and jeans, roughly a third of them work at standing desks, and you can count the number of non-millennials on one hand.
It’s too early to predict how the fintech revolution will play out, but there’s no doubt that this is the front lines of finance. And as in any commercial battle, it’s first and foremost about capturing the hearts and minds of consumers.
A growing cast of companies has emerged to meet millennials where finance and technology converge.
Simple, which teamed up with Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (BBVA) at the beginning of 2014, offers a personal checking account accessible online and through its mobile app that’s designed to help people save. It does so by giving customers the ability to create compartmentalized savings goals.
Let’s say you need $50,000 for a down payment on a house in 24 months. By entering this goal into your Simple account, it will automatically deduct $68.50 ($50,000 divided by 730 days) each day from your “Safe to Spend” figure, which is essentially a person’s checking account balance less previously earmarked money.
Another technology-driven financial firm, Moven, offers a similar service. Described as the “debit account that tracks your money for you,” its home screen shows how much a person has spent during a month compared to previous months. If you typically spend $2,000 by the middle of a month, but are currently at $2,250, Moven’s app lets you know with each successive transaction.
“We create value by helping people build better money habits,” Moven’s president and managing director Alex Sion says.
A third player in the rapidly expanding fintech space, Betterment, builds customer relationships from a different angle. It offers an automated investing service. Give it your money, tell it your goals, and Betterment’s algorithms implement a strategy tailored to your financial objectives.
According to Joe Ziemer, Betterment’s business development and communications lead, it began the year with $1 billion in assets under management and now has $2.1 billion from 85,000 customers.
Finally, a growing number of Internet-based lending marketplaces connect yield-hungry investors with people and businesses in need of funding.
The best known of the group, Lending Club, offers personal loans of up to $35,000 to consolidate debt, pay off credit card balances, and make home improvements. Businesses can borrow up to $300,000 in 1- to 5-year term loans.
Funding Circle does much the same thing, though it focuses solely on small businesses. “There’s a perception out there that everyone is efficiently banked,” says Funding Circle’s Albert Periu, “but that isn’t true.”
Beyond using technology to refine the banking experience, a common set of objectives motivates these companies. The first is their missionary-like zeal for the customer experience. Their vision is to seamlessly integrate financial services into people’s lives, to proactively help them spend less, save more, invest for retirement and acquire financing.
“We created a product that allows customers to take control of their financial lives,” says Simple’s Krista Berlincourt.
This is done using elegantly designed mobile and online products that simplify and reduce friction in the relationship between a financial services provider and its customers.
To this end, a universal obsession in the industry revolves around the onboarding experience. “The onboarding experience is the moment of truth,” says Alan Steinborn, CEO of online personal finance forum Real Money.
Lending Club claims you can “apply in under five minutes” and “get funded in a few days.” Betterment’s Ziemer says that it takes less than half the time to set up an account with Betterment than it does at a traditional brokerage.
Finally, these firms compete vigorously on cost, with many forgoing account and overdraft fees entirely. In this way, they’re not only driving down the price of financial products, they’re also more closely aligning their own incentives with those of their customers.
Fueling the fintech revolution is the fact those millennials—people born between 1981 and 2000—now make up the largest living generation in the United States labor force.
Millennials see things differently. They “use technology, collaboration and entrepreneurship to create, transform and reconstruct entire industries,” explains The Millennial Disruption Index, a survey of over 10,000 members of the generation. “As consumers, their expectations are radically different than any generation before them.”
To millennials, banks come across as inefficient and antiquated. Two years ago, 48 percent of the people surveyed for Accenture’s “North America Consumer Digital Banking Survey” said they would switch banks if their closest branch closed. Today, less than 20 percent of respondents said they would do so.
This doesn’t mean that millennials will render in-person branch banking obsolete. A 2014 survey by TD Bank found that while they bank more frequently online and on their mobile devices, 52 percent still visited a branch as frequently as they did in 2013, mostly to deposit or withdraw money. “Those who do their banking in a branch feel it is more secure and enjoy the in-person service,” the survey concluded.
Wells Fargo’s recently appointed chief data officer, A. Charles Thomas, makes a similar point, citing a Harvard Business Review study that identified “customer intimacy” as one of three “value disciplines” exhibited by long-time industry-leading companies.
The net result is that the personal element of branch banking, while still relevant and necessary to build and maintain customer relationships, is nevertheless taking a back seat to digital channels. For the first time in Accenture’s research, the firm found that “consumers rank good online banking services (38 percent) as the number one reason that they stay with their bank, ahead of branch locations and low fees, both at 28 percent.”
It’s for these reasons that many observers believe the banking industry is prone to disruption. According to The Millennial Disruption Index, in fact, banking is at the highest risk of disruption of the 15 industries examined by Viacom Media Networks for the survey.
Of the millennials queried, it found that:
Sixty-eight percent believe the way we access money will be totally different five years from now.
Nearly half think tech startups will overhaul the way banks work.
And 73 percent would be more excited about a new offering in financial services from companies like Google, Amazon and Apple, among others, than from their own bank.
This isn’t to say that younger Americans don’t trust banks. In fact, just the opposite is true. According to Accenture, “86 percent of consumers trust their bank over all other institutions to securely manage their personal data.”
It boils down instead to the simple reality that millennials are “genuinely digital first,” says Forrester Research Senior Analyst Peter Wannemacher.
More than 85 percent of America’s 77 million millennials own smartphones according to Nielsen. An estimated 72 percent have used mobile banking services within the past year, says Accenture. And, based on the latter’s research, approximately 94 percent of millennials are active users of online banking.
Banks need to think about the customer experience differently. Millennials, and increasingly people in older generations, want more than physical branches to deposit money and get a loan. They want digitally tailored solutions for their financial lives.
One way to look at Kabbage is that it’s a company of mostly millennials who are helping to recreate finance in their own image. Formed in February 2009 during the waning months of the Great Recession, when many commercial banks had curtailed their lending and some were taking capital from the federal government to strengthen their balance sheets, Kabbage provides unsecured consumer and small business loans through its online platform. It is one of the leading players in the emerging fintech sector, and to date has made over $550 million in loans.
Neither Chief Executive Officer Rob Frohwein nor the rest of his leadership team are millennials (the company does have a sense of humor, playfully describing the team on its website as the “heads of Kabbage”), but there are plenty of them working at the company. And if you’re going to hire millennials to work at a fintech company, you’ve got to offer them cool stuff like daily catered lunches and snacks, on-site yoga, top-of-the-line Macs and 27” Thunderbolt displays. And of course, you need to give them stock options for the day when the privately-held company either goes public or is acquired. The irony of the company’s name is that many millennials probably wouldn’t know, unless it was pointed out to them by their baby boomer parents, that “cabbage” is slang for money.
The financial services industry is experiencing a wave of innovation where several upstarts like Kabbage are taking an old product—money lending in some form has been around for more than two millennia—and using technology to create a 21st Century delivery and customer experience.The company provides small business lines of credit from $2,000 to $100,000, and more recently began offering consumer loans from $5,000 to $35,000, with repayment terms of either three or five years. Unlike most banks, which base their underwriting decisions primarily on the credit scores of the borrower, Kabbage takes a diverse range of information into consideration, and because the process is fully automated, the applicant receives an immediate decision.
Although conventional wisdom would argue that Kabbage is a threat to traditional banks, particularly in the consumer lending space where much of its activity is focused on consolidation of credit card-related debt, Frohwein says that he wants to work with banks and would rather be seen as collaborator than a competitor. Kabbage’s principal offering is an unsecured business line of credit. Most banks won’t provide that kind of funding without some form of collateral, and they can take weeks to make a decision. Prior to this issue going to press, the company was expected to announce agreements to work with two international banks, and Frohwein was hopeful that similar conversations with U.S. banks would also bear fruit.
Like all fintech companies, Kabbage has benefited from growing consumer comfort with doing financial transactions online. According to Frohwein, 95 percent of Kabbage’s customers never interact with a human at any point in the process. And many of them seem to like it that way. Kabbage might be a company with a culture that has been influenced by the many millennials who work there, but it has created a product that is finding acceptance among borrowers of all generations, and that adds up to a lot of cabbage. Frohwein spoke recently with Bank Director Editor Jack Milligan
Let’s talk about why there is a Kabbage.
There is a Kabbage because you can actually access data from online sources on a real-time basis allowing you to do a couple of different things.
First, you can permit a customer to have a very elegant online experience. The customer lands on the Kabbage website, which provides access to information relating to their entire business, and receives a decision within just a handful of minutes.
Because Kabbage gains access to these data sources through the customer’s authorization, we have ongoing access to data. As a result, we understand how that small business operates, not just today—at the time of qualification—but how they’re operating today and any point in between. It gives us a very rich understanding of that small business.
When we started the company, we believed this information would better reflect how a business was going to perform as a customer rather than relying on the personal credit score of the small business owner. The whole premise of the company was based on data access and technology. Our DNA is technology and data access and how that access can provide us with unique insights and customers with better experiences. I think that’s probably what separates us from some of the other players that are in this space who continue to have a lot of manual processes residing within their customer experience even though most have adopted the “data and technology” marketing speak.
When the company formed, did you feel as though you were stepping in and filling a void that was out there for small business borrowers? In 2009, obviously, we were just coming out of the financial crisis. The banking industry had closed up like a clam in terms of lending, and there was a real credit crunch, especially for smaller companies.
For sure. Despite being responsible for most of the growth in our economy, small businesses have historically been treated as the redheaded stepchild of the financial services industry. They’ve been largely ignored over the years. Though we serve all small businesses now, when we started, we focused on online retailers. Traditional lenders are reluctant to provide an online retailer with a loan. It’s not that they’re not good customers, but they’re hard-to-reach and they often have limited operating histories. They don’t have a physical presence so you can’t walk into the store and hear the cash register ringing, and see the smiles on the customers’ faces. If you can serve that audience as Kabbage has, then you can serve all small businesses, because you start with the most challenging segment of businesses.
Explain the products that you provide.
We provide a working capital line credit for small businesses. In the fourth quarter of last year we also launched a personal loan product. We have both a small business direct product and a consumer direct product.
We also started licensing our platform to third parties, which allows them to start lending in the small business and personal consumer lending space. We announced the first deal with Kikka Capital, out of Australia, a couple months ago.
Have you also had conversations with domestic banks about the possibility of working with you under a licensing arrangement?
Yes. In the U.S., we are working currently with two banks. Those discussions are in a slightly earlier stage, but we believe we will execute agreements with both of them. One relationship will center on a small business product and the other is on the consumer side.
The reaction from U.S. banks has been very positive, but it’s a difficult regulatory environment, and there’s a lot of caution that goes into that decision. It’s a process of working with the financial institution and getting them to the point where they really understand how we operate, how this compares favorably to their existing approach and how this grows their core business.
Do you see banks as competitors, or do you see them as potential partners? Or both?
I don’t think I see them as competitors, I actually see them as partners. I try to help them recognize that this is a market they can serve, it’s not a market they should ignore, and there’s a legitimate partnership opportunity here. They don’t need to take a competitive stance with us. We think we can actually work with all the banks.
How about in the consumer space? Or do banks not really focus on the size of personal loans you provide?
In the consumer space, our loans average about $15,000 and many of our customers are consolidating credit card debt so this is a segment in which banks are interested. Although banks may or may not see that as competitive, they should see what we are doing as important and core to them. However, again, banks do not need to look at us as competitive. We are working with a large U.S. bank right now to help them enter this space directly.
Though very focused on the consumer lending space for many years, small business lending has been another story for them. It’s been traditionally difficult for banks to make profitable, and that’s because there’s typically high acquisition costs, and also there’s a lot of operational inefficiencies. Banks apply the same requirements and invest the same resources for a $30,000 loan as they do for a $3 million loan. It’s just not reasonable to expect small business owners to go through that hassle for that amount of money.
Explain a little bit more about your underwriting process. It sounds like it’s a very sophisticated approach, and one that’s a little bit different than what most banks employ.
When a bank underwrites a small business loan they will have a checklist of many items they need to collect: three years of financial statements, FICO score, an asset list, whatever it might be. A bank would expect every small business lending applicant to come to the table with the exact same set of documents and information. We take a different approach.
Kabbage must meet the small business owner where that small business owner is. That means if they have a specific set of relationships with accounting companies, or credit card transaction processing systems, or social networks, or shipping companies or whatever it might be, that’s the data we need to collect and decision on. The data helps us determine the capacity, character and consistency of small and medium-sized businesses, or SMBs, just as the items the bank collects attempt to determine.
We’ve had to figure out a way to basically say, “Give us access to any number of data sources.” Without getting too technical, it’s an API, or application programming interface, approach where we’re given automated access on these electronic accounts for specified information. We don’t have the ability to write to the account, so we can’t manipulate anything within it. It does give us the right to read the information that’s contained within the accounts.
As you would imagine, it also provides us with a lot of historical information. It doesn’t just relate to the most recent period, it oftentimes goes back many months or many years in the past so we can see how these customers have performed over time.
The real key to what we do is a couple of different things. One is we are able to take all that information and make it relatable. If somebody gives us access to their credit card transaction processing information and shipping information, and another person gives us access to their marketplace information, personal credit score and social data, we’ve got to figure out, “Okay, how do I make a decision on both of those customers, and make a decision that is consistent and fair across the board?” We have developed that capability over time, and we did that through a lot of trial and error, to be frank, where we made educated decisions as to how we were going to view information. Until you get repayment information back and see the customer’s actual behavior, you really don’t know how well correlated that information is to actual performance. We’ve gone through that process over the last several years.
The nice thing about the way our product works is once somebody takes cash from our line, they pay it back within, on average, less than four months. Therefore, we are able to determine how effective our models are very rapidly.
How do you find your customers?
SMB owners do not congregate in a single place. There’s not a hall where SMB owners meet each evening and you can advertise there. They’re everywhere the population is. Therefore, we have had to become experts at locating them.
We have a blended approach. We do both traditional and digital marketing. If you log on to Kabbage.com, we’ll probably follow you for a long time online, and you’ll see more ads from us in the future. On the traditional side, we do radio and direct mail. If you watch TV, you’ll be seeing ads in the fall.
We also have a pretty robust business development arm where we enter into relationships with other businesses that have a lot of small business customers. It can be those that are offering phone systems to small businesses, or packaging for small businesses, or selling accounting software to them or whatever it might be. We try to work with the folks that work closely with small business owners.
When you look at the personal demographics of who your customers are, is there anything that’s distinctive from a generational perspective? What do you find interesting about your customer base?
We work with SMB owners that are super young and we work with folks who are much older. However, they all embrace technology at least in some manner. Although we started with online retailers, over the last couple of years, we’ve grown to include all small businesses, so you get your restaurants, your dry cleaners and your professional service firms, and everybody in-between. We see a much broader demographic than we did in the past in terms of their technology savviness.
You’d be amazed, 95 percent of our customers have a 100 percent fully automated experience. Not only do they not have to interact with anybody specifically at Kabbage, we don’t have a person on the backend specifically reviewing that file. It’s all done through our system. You’d be amazed at how many of our customers are comfortable just interacting with our system. That didn’t happen overnight; we had to figure that out the hard way. We made a lot of mistakes, and we created some bad experiences, and we worked hard to make it as comprehensible as possible. That’s what we’ve really focused on over the last five years. Now it seems easy, but we had many sleepless nights on the road to getting there.
“I think as a company, if you can get those two things right—having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff—then you can do pretty well.”
That pearl of wisdom comes from a 30–something chief executive officer who has helped launch a social media revolution in this country. Maybe you’ve heard of him–Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook. For all his precociousness, I think that Zuckerberg has identified two of the most essential traits of an effective CEO—the ability to lay out a strategic vision for the company, and then bring in talented people who can make that vision a reality. I’ve been thinking about this recently because I believe that over the next 10 years, we’re going to see a big demographic shift among the ranks of bank CEOs as the last of the baby boomers give way to younger generations including, possibly, some millennials. And the coming decade could turn out to be very interesting.
There are certain characteristics or skills that I think all CEOs, in the banking industry as elsewhere, need to have. They absolutely need to be excellent leaders, with the kind of people skills that enable them to work through others, rather than trying to accomplish everything themselves. And the larger the company, the more important it is that they know how to empower their employees. CEOs also need to have strong communication skills, both with their employees and their customers. They obviously need to be good bankers, which over the past several years has meant being good lenders. Some have become good deal makers since banking is still a consolidating industry. They also need the kind of collaborative skills that will enable them to work with an engaged board of directors, which has the potential of making them better in their jobs. And at smaller banks, the CEO needs to be well connected to their community because that’s where the business comes from.
I tend to think of these traits and skills as table stakes for effective bank CEOs. But each generation of CEOs seems to face a different kind of challenge, which calls on their adaptive capabilities. Anyone who has been in the job for the last 10 years had to deal with the challenge of the 2008–2009 financial crisis, which required many banks to work through a pile of bad loans, raise capital and adjust to a greatly increased level of regulation. Each generation of bank CEOs seem to face a different set of challenges, and I don’t expect it to be any different for the next group.
They will need a much more sophisticated understanding of technology, not just in the traditional sense of core processors, ATMs and teller platform systems, but in the larger context of how mobile and digital technology are beginning to change the delivery of consumer and small business banking products and services. And one of their biggest challenges will be to manage the transition from a distribution system that is branch–centric to one that is much more reliant on digital and mobile going forward. This is one of those trends where it might be hard to perfectly time your bank’s migration from brick–and–mortar to digital and mobile, but you don’t want to be too far out in front or too far behind.
This next generation of CEOs will also have to prepare for the emergence of millennials, both as customers and as employees. Be sure to check the July issue of Bank Director digital magazine for a fascinating cover story on the challenges of managing millennial employees, who are now entering the workforce in meaningful numbers. Millennials are also a driving force behind widespread consumer preference for alternative channels like digital and mobile, and as a group they probably have less loyalty to the concept of a traditional bank than their Gen X older siblings or baby boomer parents. Each year they will account for an increasing percentage of the industry’s customer base, and they want to be banked differently.
Unfortunately, the next generation of bankers will also have to become experts at managing the regulatory agencies that supervise their bank. Previous generations have had to worry about regulatory compliance as well, but today’s overseers play much more of an activist role and expect to have an open dialogue with the CEO and the board about any significant action or event that impacts the bank. The CEO—who is the focal point for any communication with the regulators—must be able to manage that relationship in a positive and constructive way.
The way we bank is changing. What used to happen at a branch now happens just about anywhere. Internet banking services have fast become a banking reality. And in today’s changing technology landscape, financial institutions must keep up with customer demands. So what does this mean for your institution? First Data created a white paper to help you understand the consumer technology expectations and trends in banking. We outline what a complete internet banking solution should look like, how to choose the right one, and best practices for a successful conversion program. We’ll cover topics such as:
To read the white paper, download it now.
In the past, financial institutions didn’t need to rethink the way they did business. But times have changed. Between today’s unpredictable global economy and new banking regulations recently enacted, it has never been more challenging to grow revenue, maintain profits and satisfy customers.
Today, banks and credit unions need strategic solutions to replace lost revenue, reduce costs and maximize profitability. First Data has created this white paper to help you explore new ways to effectively evolve your business in today’s world.
Our white paper addresses today’s big issues and critical areas, including:
To read the white paper, download it now.
Today’s consumers, especially those known as Millennials and Gen Y, are used to having technology integrated into most aspects of their work and personal lives. Banking is no exception. To respond to changing customer expectations, banks, credit unions and other financial institutions have incorporated online and mobile technology into consumers’ banking experiences. However, financial institutions still need to answer several questions pertaining to banking technology:
This white paper answers these and other questions that are critical to the ongoing success of financial institutions in a rapidly evolving marketplace. The paper is based upon the findings of a recent online research study of 2,000 U.S. consumers conducted jointly by First Data and Market Strategies International. The “New Consumer and Financial Behavior” study assessed consumers’ attitudes, behaviors, desires and technology adoption. This white paper is the third in a series of four based on results of the study and focuses on consumers’ attitudes and behaviors related to technology in banking.
Topics include: