If you tag along with Jeff Szyperski in Kilmarnock, Va., the first thing you notice is that he seems to know everyone he sees. Drivers roll down their car windows to yell hello. In a branch of Chesapeake Bank, he greets the customers in the teller line by name and asks them about their kids. And he knows the names of all 240 employees of … Continue reading Where Jeff Szyperski Knows Your Name
“Open banking”—is it an aspirational slogan, a discrete business model or a regulatory regime? For ABA VP Rob Morgan, who works on fintech policy, “it is what you want it to be.” The term is just vague enough to accommodate a wide variety of concepts, from access to customers’ financial data up to comprehensive financial marketplaces. In Europe, open banking is closely associated with a … Continue reading Banking’s Open Door Policy
For a growing share of bank customers—especially millennials and their successors, Generation Z, mobile banking is where they will engage with their customers most frequently. According to Federal Reserve figures, 43 percent of bank customers use mobile banking, including 67 percent of millennials. According to a TD Bank survey, mobile is the fastest-growing channel for bank customers. Today, bank mobile apps offer a great deal … Continue reading Plug and Play: Four Ways to Level Up Your Mobile Banking App
Jeopardy! viewers in 2011 witnessed a first in game show history: a computer not only competed in the show, but wiped the floor with its opponents. Watson, a cognitive computer system, left Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter—previously Jeopardy!’s top champions—in its dust over a three-round matchup. IBM built Watson specifically to compete in a trivia show, but the potential applications proved highly commercial. Watson is … Continue reading Regulatory Compliance? Elementary
Offering mobile banking is often described as the “price of admission” or “table stakes” for retail banking today. Surveys bear that out—according to a recent survey by the Federal Reserve and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, 95 percent of community banks offer mobile banking or will do so in the near future.
But while mobile banking is becoming universal, it can still cause heartburn for bankers uncertain about the return on investment. How can bankers quantify the efficiencies, savings, sales and ultimately profits that they hope mobile will bring? Continue reading “Capturing Mobile Banking ROI for Community Banks”
Bankers who think they aren’t facing competition from nonbank marketplace lenders should take a closer look, according to bank technology leaders speaking at ABA’s National Conference for Community Bankers in Palm Desert, Calif.
At Boston-based Eastern Bank, chief digital officer Dan O’Malley led an effort to review transaction data from across the bank’s deposit accounts and extract intelligence. “It’s eye-opening to see how many of your customers—both consumers and small businesses—are taking loans from alternative providers” like Lending Club, he says, noting that 5 percent of Eastern’s business customers are making payments to a nonbank marketplace lender and that the rate has been doubling annually. Continue reading “How to Understand and Partner with Marketplace Lenders”
Web 2.0: It’s a fast-paced, interactive free-for-all. On Web 2.0 platforms, Internet users generate their own content. They create massive virtual communities around shared interests. And it’s growing by leaps and bounds.
Many people have embraced Web 2.0. Many have not. But whatever they think of Web 2.0, donors should be aware of how social media affects their public image. And few things affect public image as much as Wikipedia, the free, online, interactive encyclopedia. Continue reading “Something Wiki This Way Comes”
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Wikipedia is just one example of a wiki—a collaborative website that allows users to modify its content. First created by programmer Ward Cunningham in 1994, wikis are named after the Hawaiian word for “fast.” Since then, thousands of other wikis have proliferated, far more than just the Wikimedia Foundation’s sites.
One of the most prominent wikis is the Encyclopedia of Life, available online at eol.org. It traces its origins to the 2007 TED conference, where biologist E. O. Wilson articulated the need for a comprehensive record of life on earth. “Human-forced climate change alone—again, if unabated—could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades,” he explained. “What will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded?” Continue reading “Foundations and Wikis”
