Green Dot Manages New Bank, and New Frontiers

[1] BTN: What new projects are underway at the firm?

MacIlwaine: The IT team is focused on a couple of things right now, the first is differentiating our prepaid business through tech innovation, which includes creating more customization for consumers. To do that, our platform will need to be flexible and configurable.

[2] What tech innovation are you excited about, and how can it make a difference at Green Dot?

Right now [mobile] is at an inflection point. The technology capabilities are expanding and the ubiquity of mobile devices is growing. We also have the growth of social networking. There is now an entire generation of consumers who are connected to each other via social networking, so it's becoming a critical component of doing business ...The organizations that can best capture mobile access and social networking will do the best work.

[3] How can you make social networking and mobile work together to best suit Green Dot?

Facebook has Facebook credits and Xbox has credits. The idea is to send and use currency that can be converted to cash or loyalty offers. There are a lot of financial services firms that are trying to do this, but the trick is to have good social networking capabilities.

[4] How can you use mobile or social networking to further loyalty offers?

We have the ability to send discount coupons to consumers who are on a social network near or at the point of sale...to do this you need to have integration with the merchant point of sale system and the prepaid card technology to process transactions at the same time.

[5] How does the Bonneville Bancorp acquisition change your department's mission?

We'll be able to control our own destiny from an IT perspective because we now own a bank and can issue our own cards. We need less approval or input from third parties to offer new services, which reduces risk and will shorten our time to market (Green Dot previously relied on unaffiliated bank issuing partners). We'll be able to move new services though the development cycle from idea to deployment much faster. Banks are more heavily regulated, but we'll also have more control over development.

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
Bank technology
MORE FROM AMERICAN BANKER