A Vision for 'Frictionless' Banking

A former (and sometimes current) critic of banks, Brett King is hanging out his own financial services shingle.

Brett King
Movenbank
Author and company founder
Latest breakthrough: The author and bank critic's financial services startup has developed a new scoring product called CRED, which uses social media as part of its credit and other pricing decisions.

Much like the 19th-century railroad developers who built in uninhabited regions in anticipation of boom towns that had yet to arrive, Brett King's Movenbank is a mobile-heavy financial services startup that's still waiting on the technology and marketplace to catch up to its vision. That market evolution is not guaranteed, making Movenbank and its future performance one of the most compelling stories in retail finance over the next year.

King, a frequent lecturer, bank critic and author of the bank-skewering book, "Bank 2.0," is not only happy with the mobile technology lag, it's his new company's ace in the hole. "We're a little bit ahead of the curve and will be waiting for the mainstream and public to adopt contactless (near-field communication smartphone) transactions," King says. "If we wait until contactless is mass-marketed to everyone, we've missed out on our opportunity."

As Movenbank moves closer to launch later this year, it's being closely watched by at least three different industries - banking, mobile commerce and payments - even though it's not a bank, telecom or card company. What's put Movenbank in the spotlight is its fully digital model. Movenbank is an online and mobile-only company whose motto is "no paper, no plastic, no hidden fees." It is using social media and expanded data to build its own scores that will help inform credit and pricing decisions.

King hopes the company's mobile banking interface will put it in frequent touch with customers for relationship management, and will allow the startup to charge lower fees than banks because Movenbank won't have a national branch network to maintain. King contends 50,000 customers doing a few transactions per week - its goal for early 2013 - will allow Movenbank to break even while being more nimble than traditional banks. "What's happened with Borders, Blockbuster and other retail businesses that have been disrupted by tech will happen here," King says.

Much like Simple (the former BankSimple), Movenbank, of New York, will control the front end of the customer relationship and will store deposits with banks. Movenbank has signed a deal with Bancorp Bank in Delaware and is in talks with additional banks. And much like Simple, that deposit relationship with banks isn't stopping King from criticizing traditional banks' service capabilities.

"The role of the banker is to give you advice. The reality is banks don't advise customers these days," he says. "The primary goal of Movenbank is to give consumers advice on a daily basis, to help them understand the impact of their spending in making daily decisions."

Movenbank this summer will release its banking application, which uses NFC-enabled phones or phones with an NFC sticker, for closed-loop testing, with a broader public release to follow the tests. Movenbank eventually hopes to offer its service internationally. NFC-enabled phones are still thought to be a year or so away from wide availability, and while mobile payments are starting to catch on, they're still fairly new and have volumes that are far below credit and debit card payments. King is betting on that changing as NFC phones become widespread and mobile payments become mainstream.