Banking

In her latest column for Forbes, 11:FS Head of Research Sarah Kocianski analyses Chime's recent outages and challengers' reliance on third-party processors.

With the industry evolving rapidly around us, there’s little room for anyone who isn’t able to change at pace. A six month old greenfield codebase will be brown before you know it. You must be able to move quickly.

From dreams of running a five-star hotel to the reality of running a five-star bank, Ashok Vaswani, the CEO of Barclays UK, speaks with Simon Taylor about culture, digital transformation challenges and opportunities, front line staff empowerment and how Simon might be able to buy a Lamborghini in the future.

This post appeared first in The Times and Raconteur in the UK in June 2016. Until the financial crisis banks had enjoyed decades of growth unencumbered by the disruption seen in the newspaper, telecommunications and music industries. During the good years banks’ profits soared and, while they embraced customer-facing internet and mobile apps, the foundations, processes and technology on which banks are built, despite billions spent on technology, would look familiar to those who worked there in the 1970s. UK banks now face the perfect storm of significant technological advancements plus a regulator and government that want to foster innovation, and an ever-growing disillusionment of banking customers to banks’ offerings.

It may not have escaped your attention that the British Public voted to leave the EU. Although in the aftermath it’s still unclear quite what that actually means, this morning bank shares have taken a significant hit with Lloyds off 8%, Barclays 10% and RBS down 15% leading the LSE to halt trading in those stocks. There are a number of theories about what happens next. Are people concerned about retail banking operations, corporate banking, investment banking or all of the above? Here are some ideas.

Spending billions on digital transformation – and bragging about it – seems to be the only game in town for large incumbent banks. But this spending hasn’t paid off, and financial institutions continue to battle a heavy fixed-cost base. You know digital transformation is critical, so how do you convince an incumbent bank’s CFO and CxOs that digital transformation doesn’t have to cost billions or take decades?

In the past decade, the banking industry has seen an incredible amount of innovation and disruption. New entrants like Monzo in the UK and Nubank in Latin America are finally taking on the incumbents that, for decades, were impossible to challenge.

The UK’s digital-only challenger banks are currently engaged in something of an arms race to offer customers the broadest range of features and services. Hot on the heels of joint accounts, coming soon from both Monzo and Starling, came Monzo’s announcement that its customers can now use TransferWise within the bank’s app to send money abroad.

I’m sure that you’ve seen the same presentations that I have. An expert from a large consultancy stands up and his first slide says “API stands for Application Programming Interface”. He continues with a description of new regulations (PSDII / CMA) and describes the technology that will let customers give third parties to access their banking data and trigger new transactions. That’s all true, but it’s a mistake to start there, it leads in the wrong direction.

Fintechs can’t hire product marketers quick enough at the moment. If you’re new to the marketing game and looking to become a specialist rather than a generalist, then it’s probably one of the most interesting areas to specialise in right now.

For Season 2 of Connection Interrupted we’re kicking off in style with a super star of media, social media, podcasting and much much more: Gary Vaynerchuk! I had the pleasure of meeting Gary at the Vaynermedia offices in NYC with one mission: to try and get to know him, to find out who the real Gary is behind brand Gary V: the man who loves his family (and the Jets). Listen to the episode here or below and read on for my personal highlights.

In its final report, the Competition and Markets Authority has formally implemented reforms aimed at giving people more control of their money. By Q1 of 2018, European banks have to completely open up their data through full APIs. But some banks aren’t prepared to wait that long. Read on to see which ones have taken the lead.

Lately I’ve noticed a few banks and fintechs wanting to “get started designing screens right away”. It seems great, but building the wrong thing is worse than building nothing at all.

Over the past eight years, as a fintech founder who happens to be gay, I’ve met with 100+ corporate and institutional investors around the world.

I was recently asked by a client: ‘how do I hire a design team?’