Mobile payments: friend or foe?

Guest blog post by Tony Virdi, Head of Cognizant's Financial Services Practice for the UK and Ireland 

VocaLink’s introduction of its new mobile payment service, Zapp, is the latest sign that mobile payments are gaining serious momentum. With the anticipated launch of the UK Payments Council’s ubiquitous interbank mobile P2P payments service next year, we are seeing a major disruption to traditional banking.

To date, it is clear that banks have not been able to truly capitalise on the wider m-commerce opportunity available. The disparate nature of retailers, banking institutions and consumers themselves have placed many obstacles in the road and while many mobile payment and mobile banking apps exist, they have either been platform-specific and tricky to interoperate, or unable to fulfil banking and payments standards.

Mobile payments technologies themselves are in their infancy; their continued evolution is affecting tried and tested payment acceptance processes. Services like Square, iZettle and Paylaven are disrupting traditional merchant payment providers while at the same time, smartphones are becoming payment acceptance devices, thereby reducing the time to bring on board new merchants and also reducing cost of transaction.

As new wearable devices such as Google Glasses and the iWatch arrive on the scene, their ease of use will allow customers will complete even more digital transactions on the go. This all means that banks are increasingly focusing on m-commerce as a means of both providing better customer service and meeting demand as well as enhancing their top lines. M-commerce provides banks with unique opportunities to develop complete and holistic payment solutions in collaboration with retailers and telecom providers so as to provide customers with seamless, safe and secure ways of paying for the goods and services they buy on their mobile devices.   

However, with an increase in mobile payments also comes risk. Whether anti-money laundering (AML), fraud, device theft or shoulder surfing, this is no different to any other new technology. In the case of mobile payments, these risks converge with those of the financial services and telecommunications industries. For example, big data analytics helps such organisations comply with industry regulations and better manage risk. As a result, the regulators, telecom operators and hardware vendors will all need to work closely together to parry the threats of fraud and have the technology and processes in place to achieve this.

Only once these problems have been overcome will the market flourish. Above all, ensuring a good customer experience should be the ultimate goal for all parties involved – mobile payments need to be easy and risk free. With constant movements in the industry and new players entering the game, the wind of change is rife and it is progressively being driven by consumer demand as they seek new channels for payments (and communication). Banks must embrace this disruption at pace to retain their relevance and move with the times.

Waxing lyrical

The latest FStech videocast is now online, in which I discuss some of the financial sector technology stories that have caught my eye over the past couple of weeks.

This includes the news that Fidelity Investments is testing a Google Glass markets app. The US FS firm's R&D arm, Fidelity Labs, is participating in a Google early developer programme, and is working with a prototype of Google Glass to better understand the technology and how it may benefit customers.

It has issued a concept video entitled 'A day in the life of a Fidelity customer using Google Glass'. And it has also released its first experiment with the technology, allowing customers to receive, at market close, quotes from the major indexes.

You can watch the videocast here.

Latest FStech videocast

The latest FStech videocast is now online.

In this one, I give the lowdown on the FStech Multi-Channel Banking Conference, which took place last month. There is also a full review of the conference in our July/August, due out next week. Click here for subscription details.

You can watch the videocast here.

Happy viewing!

Teenagers. Who knows what they want? They do…

Guest blog post by Harrison Roberts (currently doing work experience at FStech)

Teenagers often read articles written by experts, who are a few decades away from the people they are supposedly representing, about what they want from their banks. Maybe these experts know what they’re talking about (to be fair they probably do) but the people that really know what teenagers are looking for are, quite obviously, teenagers.

So here we have it, a blog post about what teenagers want from banking, written by a teenager. Firstly I do not pretend to be expressing the thoughts of the entire teenage species, just my thoughts. A lot of people seem to believe that young people wish to have any and all information fired at them through social media such as Facebook or Twitter, however this is not entirely true in areas such as banking. I can see the idea; social media is a simple and easy way to contact a massive audience (average of over 4,000 followers for biggest banks) at no cost. However as a teenager, I would log on to Twitter to follow what various celebrities had for breakfast. I wouldn’t think of searching to see what Barclays’ most recent hashtag has been. Social media has its purpose, and that purpose isn’t banking.

Another common misconception is that if a teenager cannot do whatever it is they want to do on their phone, then they simply will not do it. Mobile banking is very useful and is becoming a necessity in the modern world. According to an online and mobile banking report by Online Financial Innovations, “We are almost at the peak of online access, with just one million new online households added last year, the fewest annual total since internet banking came on the scene in 1995. The growth going forward will almost all be on the mobile front.”

Despite this, I do feel that face-to-face, ‘in-store’ meetings with an actual human can often be just as, if not more, helpful and convenient as using your mobile or PC. Perhaps the use of technologies like kiosks or even iPads in branches would reinvigorate branch banking and would stop in their tracks those who say that the end is nigh for the High Street?

Cross channel challenges

Banks with multi-channel aspirations must shake off old ways of working and start acting more like start ups. And they have much to learn from retailers in this respect. That was one of the messages to come from the FStech Multi-Channel Banking Conference, which took place in London yesterday.

 

Featuring contributions from the likes of Barclays, HSBC, Santander, BNP Parabas, Consult Hyperion, Ovum and Intellect and chaired by Practicology's Martin Newman, the conference looked at how banks are progressing in terms of multi-channel strategies and delivering the consistent service needed to engage and retain customers.  

 

A big thank you to all our speakers and panellists and sponsors, Perforce and Transversal, plus analyst partner Ovum, for helping to make it a really good day; there was lots of lively debate on such topics as mobile banking, future challenges of mobile banking, multi-channel banking security, improving the customer experience and social media. Thanks also to Martin Newman who did a great job as chairman.

 

A full review of the conference will appear in the July/August edition of FStech magazine, available early August.  

Everybody was multi-channel banking!

Apologies, terrible heading, I know...Anyhoo, last minute plug for the FStech Multi-Channel Banking Conference, taking place tomorrow at the IoD Hub, London.

I'm reliably informed that there are a few delegate places remaining, so if you're in London tomorrow and fancy catching up on all things multi-channel banking-related, you can register to attend here.

Chaired by Practicology's Martin Newman, the conference will look at how banks are progressing in terms of multi-channel strategies and delivering the consistent service needed to engage and retain customers. It will also highlight the latest technology solutions available to institutions looking to achieve multi-channel success.

There will be speakers/panellists from the likes of Barclays, HSBC, Santander, BNP Parabas, Ovum and Intellect. The conference agenda can be found at: http://www.fstech.co.uk/conference/agenda.php 

Hopefully see you there!

Do you have a flight recorder on your website?

Guest blog post by John Thompson, CEO, User Replay

Commercial aircraft have carried flight recorders for over 50 years. These devices do not prevent crashes directly, but their invaluable data enables technical bugs to be fixed, improving safety for us all. Knowing what actually happened also resolves disputes about liability and compensation. Like a damaged airplane, a crashed website cannot talk back, and often leaves few clues as to what happened. When a web transaction goes wrong this lack of audit trail creates disputes, particularly on financial services sites where transactions may have significant value.

Similarly, if a recording is made of all user interactions with a website, errors can be found and fixed. Bugs on sites often go unreported, but they damage conversion rates and customer experience significantly. Who has not been scared away by a 404 error? Bugs can be very elusive and hard to replicate because they are often triggered by a complex combination of circumstances. It is therefore important to record them at the time they happen so they can be replayed both visually in screen shots and at the level of the underlying code.

A recording of web journeys also helps with disputes. “Yes you did buy the fund that went down, and here is a slide show of screenshots of you doing it.” We wouldn’t contemplate not recording telephone conversations when selling financial products, or having a bank branch without a CCTV, but we are happy to trade millions through websites with only the most rudimental log files recording events.

Recording all transactions on a website is now relatively straight forward technologically. The technology is known as ‘session replay’ and there are a number of excellent vendors. In Econsultancy’s 2012 Report on Customer Struggle, 57 per cent of respondents recognised that session replay is very effective but only 17 per cent had it implemented on their sites. Maybe session replay is a technology whose time has come?

Certainly Cofunds has achieved great results with this technology as you can see here: http://www.userreplay.com/resources/cofunds_case_study