In a disruptive marketplace, CUs have one crucial bit of leverage

If you think there’s consolidation in the banking space now, just wait.

That was the message from Jay Samit, independent vice chairman of digital reality for Deloitte, who explained that increased consolidation will be driven largely by technology, which “does a whole lot of things faster and better” than people.

Jay Samit, independent vice chairman of digital reality for Deloitte, speaking during the California and Nevada Credit Union Leagues' 2018 conference in Hollywood.

Samit’s remarks came during the California and Nevada Credit Union Leagues’ recent annual conference in Hollywood, and he predicted that along with consolidation and a changing role for humans within the FI space, increased biometrics will also lead to fewer cards and less fraud.

“China is skipping credit cards for mobile payments. What happens to credit unions when Amazon or Apple launch their own currency?” he asked. “Peer-to-peer payments are becoming international and blockchain is getting funded like crazy.”

If CUs hope to have any leverage in this new landscape, he observed, they’re going to have to leverage the one advantage they have: trust.

“How personalized can you make your chat bot banker? Figure out how to make money not off the user, but off their data,” he advised. “Data beats opinions. If you are not a data-centric company, you are not going to survive. But more data requires more creativity. Less than 1 percent of data is analyzed.”

The consumer peer-to-peer rental market already is worth $26 billion, which Samit said is just the leading edge of the sharing economy. “Credit unions have to get into the business of anticipating customer needs. Looking to the past trends is no longer going to work,” he counseled.

The world is seeing exponential disruption, from now-familiar names such as Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, Alibaba and Bitcoin. But according to Samit, “Disruption is not what happens to you, it is how you respond to what happens to you.”

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