Customer Relations: Dave Martin, chief development officer at Financial Supermarkets Inc., jumpstarted a lively discussion when he suggested people, not prices, win business. "People are attracted to and tend to remain loyal to bankers and businesses they know, like and trust," he wrote. "Whether or not we fit that description is entirely up to us and what we choose to wake up each morning and get to work on." Most readers agreed with this assessment, though a few added caveats. "This premise holds more water in rural America than it does in a major city," one commented. "Yet if your pricing and service 'suck' then your ability to retain this customer declines." Another noted, "the big question is how to get known, liked, and trusted in a digital banking environment with few, if any, person-to-person interactions." Elsewhere, new contributor Michael McEvoy of ath Power Consulting argued that too many banks are treating mobile offerings as an afterthought. "Banks have typically deployed mobile banking as an addendum to online banking," he wrote. "Customer experience suffers, and, in this case, mobile banking usage is discouraged, in favor of the more robust online offering."
Columnist Potpourri: In his latest The Monetary Future column, Jon Matonis, welcomed the emergence of a self-regulatory organization for virtual currencies, but warned that steps must be taken to ensure that the SRO doesn't get co-opted by the government. "As self-regulatory organizations are excellent non-governmental solutions for industry best practices, they need to be vigilant about maintaining the integrity of the original mission," he wrote. "In the case of bitcoin as a negotiable digital asset class, the protection of core fundamental attributes includes perfect fungibility, payment irreversibility and user-defined privacy." One reader thought it was unlikely that Bitcoin would get turned into Govcoin anytime soon. "If the U.S. really tried to crack down on the original Bitcoin protocol, it would simply accelerate the brain drain of Bitcoin entrepreneurs moving abroad to start their ventures in more friendly countries," this commenter speculated. Meanwhile, risk consultant Mayra Rodríguez Valladares applauded Basel's new guidance on derivatives' counterparties for addressing prior shortcomings in her Busy Summer in Basel series.
Thank You: BankThink would like to thank everyone who turned out for our Tweet Chat on The Future Model of Banking Thursday. The lively discussion was a great way to close out the series. Anyone looking to revisit the contributors' posts and/or readers' comments can check out the series landing page or read our slideshow "New Visions of Banking's Future." We look forward to future sharing of ideas.
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