Royal Bank of Scotland’s 2012 results came in today in what the bank said was a ‘chastening’ year. Part of the £5.2 billion of losses was caused by hefty fines for a number of banking mistakes. Among these are a fine of £700 million for mis-selling interest rate swaps to (fairly) small businesses and another for £450 million for mis-selling payment protection insurance to retail bank customers. But could these problems be a thing of the past thanks to mobile technology. If RBS and its peers in the banking industry really want to prevent problems like mis-selling, equipping customer-facing staff with good employee apps covering single lines of banking business (like payment protection) could be the answer. That way the bank could control its employees in a good way with apps that give them information on the bank’s ‘product’ and steer them through a process that truly offers fair value to the customers.

In March MyPrivateBanking Research publishes its report on Mobile Solutions for Financial Advisors, an area where mobile apps are already enabling better (and compliant) interactions with clients. Please keep a look out here for more information.

There will be a new report by MyPrivateBanking Research on “Mobile Apps for Advisors”;  the publication date should be early March. Right now our analyst team is busy analyzing the market for mobile advisoer solutions - native apps as well as web-based products. We can already says that this market is red-hot as a wave of new products has been released over the last 6-12 months.

Several trends are pushing these products: advisors bringing their own devices to their banks or advisory firms; clients who expect their personal advisors to use state-of-the-art tools and not throwing around heaps of paper; and last but not least the desire of banks and wealth managers to make the advisory process much more effective and efficient.

But are the software vendors ready to meet these challenges? Are their products truly mobile or just (bad) copies of their desk-top-web-versions? Do vendors understand the real dynamics that go on in face-to-face meetings between clients and their advisors? Are the vendors taking into consideration regulatory and compliance rules with their solutions? What is the scope of the offered solutions? How good are they in linking to back-end and legacy systems? These questions and many more will be answered by our report…

The report will give an in-depth profile of nine important vendor solutions, an overview of general market trends and recommendations to solution purchasers (banks, wealth managers etc.) what to look for in advisory apps.

Just coming back from the M-Days in Frankfurt (the biggest European event on mobile apps and business). Here are some (random) ideas and thoughts I had while strolling around on the fair and talking to various represenatives from start-ups, telcos, banks, but also the bigger software vendors and content players who showed up in Frankfurt:

1. Mobile payment is (again) a big topic. A number of start ups is experimenting with mobile payment solutions based on QR codes, SMS or other verification mechanisms. Banks and telcos seem to sit on the sidelines and watching the games rather passively. Big players like PayPal are  in the process of coming out with a mobile solution soon (it’s called “PayPal Here”). Starbucks has now introduced a mobile payments system in Germany where the customer can use his or her mobile phone to pay without cash or card in any Starbucks. A start-up that is developing a mobile payment standard in Germany is called iZettle. My personal opinion: not sure if big changes in payment are really happening. I guess payment via credit cards, bank transfer/ bank acont, or pre payment are still ruling the world. (However, our mobile app analyst Rosalia Engchuan is pointing out that some banks are already offering apps for mobile payments, sometimes by sending the payment  to another mobile device so the receiver does not have to be customer of the same bank.)

2. Some start ups are trying to disintermediate banks via aggregator banking apps (you can look at and make transactions across multiple bank accounts and banks within one app) with value added tools (like showing expenses by category per month etc.). Check out FinanzBlick for instance. I think this could become a threat to banks if they are not able to offer attractive apps themesves, adding some aggregation features.

3. App store visibility: how well is your app positioned in e app stores? How easily can the app be found? Do you promote your app in the app store? Looking at our latest research for banking apps I think that is a big problem for banks as quite often their apps are hard to search and find. Also descriptions are poor. There are also services to manipulate app ratings and reviews - some providers are definitely making an effort to have a good rating/positioning. Definitely something most banks have to catch up on.

4. App tracking. I haven’t seen a lot of good tools to track app usage like downloads, conversions, transactions, views etc. etc.

5. I think there are lots of good ideas in consumer goods and retail apps that banks could learn from. Apps like Cardstar (aggregating customer cards, you don’t need to carry 10 different cards with you to get dsicounts, points and whatever, just show your mobile) could be a role model for aggregating bank and credit cards. Or using location based information to send specific marketing info via an app. Why not send an offer for a car loan to a client who is walking into a car dealer ship? (Again our mobile banking app analyst Rosalia points out that the interviews for our latest research report on mobile banking apps also showed that some users are just looking for core functions in banking apps and do not expect or want additional features and content.)

MyPrivateBanking  was invited to present our research on the impact of the mobile revolution for insurance companies at the Versicherungsforen Leipzig Conference 2013 in Germany. This is probably the leading forum for all things insurance and technology in Europe. We offer members of the MyPrivatebanking Research Community the main charts on the trends, usage numbers, best practices and conclusions for free. Please click here for the slides. (The presentation slides are in German)

Knab, the new Internet bank, that’s a wholely-owned subsidiary of the Dutch insurance giant Aegon, has an interesting approach to the provision of financial advice. The name, ‘bank’ back-to-front, has been chosen to suggest not just innovation but re-engineering of retail banking, and when it comes to providing financial advice they certainly seem to be living up to their revolutionary principles. Firstly, they won’t actually be offering any advice of their own, just offering customers the opportunity to choose from a panel of pre-selected financial advisors. However, the final touch is the most interesting idea; customer reviews of these financial experts that are publicly available. Advisors have to receive good reviews in order qualify to continue to be available for hire through Knab. With this combination of the bank vetting the advisors first and the customers’ satisfaction scores, the Knab team may have succeeded in creating one of the safest environments for retail customers in the industry. This experiment deserves to be watched closely.

Uhhh…sorry. The correct quote reads: “Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do“. Interesting story on CNN Money, argues that

Computers are better at organizing and recalling complex information than a hotshot Harvard MD. They’re also better at integrating and balancing considerations of patient symptoms, history, demeanor, environmental factors, and population management guidelines than the average physician. Besides, 50% of MDs are below average! Computers also have much lower error rates. Shouldn’t we take advantage of that when it comes to our health?!

I am pretty sure you can replace the word doctor/MD with financial adviser and the prediction still seems not outside of the imaginable. You just have to check out some of the hopeful new start-ups in the wealth management space to see how the future might look like, not only for doctors…

At first glance, ISSUU seems to be filling a significant gap in the range of social media: providing a way for banks and other businesses to engage with the public through print publications in the same way that YouTube provides a vital outlet for corporate video content. The site passes the first test, of providing a lot of attractive content. If you want a beauty parade for publishers and graphic designers, ISSUU is a good place to go. However, the site has yet to be included among the fairly select group of Internet presences that have become meeting places on a mass scale. To achieve that status, ISSUU needs to recognize that readers (and that’s who most site visitors will be) are more concerned with finding individual articles of interest than admiring a magazine cover to cover. They need more help from the site, probably in the form of (blog-style) tags for articles. The finance industry has to accept that their material will be jostling for readers’ attention alongside competitor offerings. If ISSUU insists on always preserving the integrity of individual publications in presenting content, it won’t become the channel of choice for finance industry players to grow their readership.

ISSUU

Our head of research, Steffen Binder, was invited to present our research on the impact of the mobile revolution for wealth management and private banking at the Euroforum Private Banking Summit 2012 in Zurich. He joined a panel discussion together with Credit Suisse’s private banking head in Switzerland and received lots of applause from the audience - which seemed particularly surprised to learn of the already high usage of mobile apps by the wealthy across the globe. We still don’t feel that mobile apps are as high on the agenda of private bankers as they should be – but are sure it will be soon. At least for those banks that aspire to grow their business with the wealthy in the next 5 to 10 years.

We offer members of the MyPrivatebanking Research Community the main charts on the trends, usage numbers, best practices and conclusions for free. Please click here for the slides. Of course, the best presentation still needs a speaker and we recognize that this presentation is incomplete without oral commentary. But we think it still provides great insights and data.

Steffen Binder speaks at Private Banking Summit

Only a few days after publication this brandnew report has already made it into the media:

Insurance Journal: Report Finds Less than 10% of Global Insurers Using ‘App’ Strategy

Insurance Networking News: AXA, State Farm, Humana and Aegon Top Global Mobile App Ranking

CIO: Versicherungs-Apps nicht nutzerfreundlich (German)

Das Investment: Versicherer nutzen nur 20 Prozent des Potenzials von Apps (German)

Fortune is reporting that Australia’s Commonwealth Bank and Facebook are quietly building the first Facebook banking app:

“Facebook is quietly planning just such an offering with Australia’s Commonwealth Bank. Currently in an internal beta, with the first version built in March, the application is expected to launch sometime this year to customers. It will allow Facebook users who are bank customers to make payments to third parties as well as Facebook friends through the social media channel, according to the bank. Commonwealth will secure transactions with its own authentication system — similar to how payments are secured on its online and mobile banking site, a spokesperson says.”

It’s an interesting experiment and also quite logical, given the rising interest of financial services companies in the use of social media. In combination with a fundamental shift in cosumer behavior - the younger generations are heavy users of social media plus the older gernerations are also adopting these platforms - it makes a lot of sense to use social networks also for financial transactions. For the banks the critical question is whether they want to use a third party (like Facebook) or whether they will be capable to offer their own social media channels - not onlöy for communication but also for transactions.