A geeky blog about digital thinking, digital doing and technology

This week has been all about the disruption of the Financial Service sector, well for me anyway; I’ve been exploring the future of traditional banks through the eyes of millennials, pretty interesting stuff when you really get under the skin of it. 

Once upon a time (which for me is before the Internet became adopted mainstream) banking was based on the banking giants being in control; they had the money, they got to dictate their terms, from opening hours to transfer charges, meaning we mere mortals had to play by their rules. 

The Internet has changed this, and with disruptive start ups like; Transferwise, Credit Karma, Lending club, Privlo, Avantcredit (the list goes on) all delivering better placed insightful thinking with more convenient and contextual user friendly solutions, the consumer now has choice, ease of use and more importantly ease of moving around. 

So what does this mean for the Giants? It means they are no longer in control. 

I was part of a workshop last week with a bunch of industry leads, where we were fueled with coffee and left in a room to decipher how technology has lowered the barriers for these disrupters, and how we should be navigating the landscape moving forwards…

Essentially, startups get to copy the infrastructure set by traditional Giants and simply create a frictionless, seamless interface making it easier to bundle these services together in a friction-free way. This means the old school need to stop trying to use the existing tech to just push services they already have and realize a top down centralised approach won’t work anymore, in our ever increasing Internet of Things, there are thousands of data points now so the model must flip to a bottom up collective. 

Giants will need to truncate their legacy systems to give more choice and more personalization, if they don’t they will lose further pace, they’ve already lost the edge on driving innovation and millennials are losing their patience in equal measures.

In short, we must address the minutiae to reach the mass, empowering rather than enforcing.