Our most sought-after speaker on the future of banking, author of best-seller Bank 2.0, Brett King, shares his insights on how Steve Jobs has changed banking forever, on top of his many disruptive innovations.
Below is the extract of his article at the Huffington Post:
Detaching Banking from the Bank
This is not the sole legacy of Steve Jobs and the team at Apple, but when we look back on banking in 10-20 years time when branches have disappeared, we will attribute the destruction of the traditional value chain of banking to the death of the ‘store.’ Not all stores are destroyed, of course, but where you have goods or services that can be easily digitized or where distribution does not absolutely require physicality, then the value chain is disrupted. The two big upsets in this evolution of the store were really Amazon’s destruction of the book store, and iTunes destruction of video and music stores.
iTunes was the more significant disruptor for banking, because the “App” has disrupted the retail financial services distribution platform by changing ownership of the customer experience. Today banks who want customers to have access to their banking through a mobile “App” no longer have direct access to customers. Customers download the ‘bank’ from Apple or from Google, and banks need to meet the criteria of the ‘store’ before customers can get access to that functionality.
In the future the destruction of the physicality of banking from branches, cheques, cards and cash will all be attributed to the emergence of the iPhone. The smartphone with Apps, supported by an App store in the initial instance was the trigger for a whole evolution of interaction on-the-move. Then the mobile wallet and distributed, pervasive, engaged banking through a device that enables payments and connects customers with their bank everyday, will eliminate the need for “the bank”, but not banking products and services.
Gone, but not forgotten
When historians look back at the massive shift in banking and the rapid decline in branch activity, the death of cheques, plastic and cash — the inflection point will be the creation of the App Phone. This is perhaps Steve Jobs’ greatest legacy for banking today.
He has changed the way our customers behave, he’s changed the way we think, and the way we demand service. Thanks to Steve Jobs’ vision — banking of the future will be about banking embedded everyday into our life, a true utility, and no longer a place you go.
In the end when the dust settles, there will still be banks at the backend owning the wires, payments networks and carrying the risk, but they won’t own the customer. The customer will hardly notice banking embedded in their daily life as they go shopping with their phone, as they buy a new car or home, or as they travel overseas or send their kids off to college. It will just be a part of our everyday life, and my kids won’t even remember the days when you used to have to go to a building before you could do this stuff.
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