The Future of Banking Is All About Context: Brett King

What do banks need to do to compete with nimble and high-tech financial services newcomers? Brett King, founder of Movenbank, BTN's 2012 Innovator of the Year, author of the new book "Bank 3.0" and sometime bank critic, sat down with us and shared his current thinking on where the industry needs to go, and the latest on Movenbank's delayed launch and the moving target that is his company's intriguing CRED reputation score for assessing creditworthiness.

What's the difference in message between your earlier book, "Bank 2.0," and your new book, "Bank 3.0"?
In "Bank 2.0," I was trying to raise awareness that multichannel banking is not an option or an add-on, it's going to become the primary way people bank, so you've got to get the infrastructure in place. It's only going to get harder for you to engage customers if you don't have a competent digital strategy.

Then I realized — and part of this came out of experience of building Movenbank and knowing the guys at Simple — that customers just want solutions to their day-to-day financial problems. For most financial issues, people need a bank product or service to be very contextual. Right now banks have the luxury of saying, "You can't buy that car or house until you come to us, fill out this paperwork, let us complete this risk assessment and then we'll decide whether or not to take you on as a customer." That's not efficient and it's not a friendly process; it's focused on KYC and traditional distribution mechanisms.

It's a myth that you can visit a banker and get great advice. We surveyed customers and 95% of them said they couldn't remember ever receiving any advice from a bank in a branch.

Banking has to work when and where you need it. The best advice and the best service in financial services happens in real time and is based on customer behavior, using principles of Big Data, mobility, and gamification.

When you talk about being contextual, are you thinking of things like USAA's and Commonwealth Bank of Australia's apps for home and car buyers, which guide the user through the entire purchasing process with an embedded real-time loan process for those who are interested?
I think those are great examples. You'll probably find two approaches to this. One is the relationship approach taken by CommBank and USAA, where they have a strong consumer base and can use these tools to build brand loyalty. But given the way the market is moving, your bank may have to detect you're in a car dealership and that you're in the market for a vehicle, so some of it may be driven by search and location. Car dealers and realtors may become great partners for banks.

Senator Al Franken is trying to reintroduce a bill that would govern the way companies use geolocation data. A lot of bankers are hesitant to start tracking customers' location data out of concern about what their own regulators will say. If Congress acts, that may put more pressure on the regulators.
I think you're right, there's going to be pressure. But keep in mind, there's always going to be an option for opting in where the customer willingly shares her data. I can't see an environment where Congress or regulators would prevent people from sharing their own data. We're moving into an economy where sharing this type of data in a tradeoff for some kind of value or service is becoming extremely acceptable, especially to Gen Y. We've got a billion people on Facebook sharing stuff we would never have thought people would share in the past.