Radius Bank veteran Mike Butler lays out his vision for Grasshopper Bank. He seeks to expand beyond his previous bank’s focus on tech companies to offer a broader range of solutions to small businesses – a market he believes is underserved. And with geography not being a factor in the digital world, he’s looking at doing this on a national scale.
Account-to-Account (A2A) payments are emerging as the latest threat to traditional interchange income. Also known as “Pay by Bank”, this service allows direct transfers between the bank accounts of merchants and their customers, avoiding the standard payment rails (and revenue source) for transaction processing. Seeing the writing on the wall, major banks and card companies are investing in A2A-related technologies. This service may also create new opportunities for financial institutions and should be watched closely.
Low-code and no-code development tools enable business users to quickly develop applications with minimal or no actual coding experience. This helps alleviate development constraints from over-burdened IT departments and helps unleash the creative potential of the company by allowing ‘citizen-developers’ to quickly build and experiment with technology solutions.
Customer profitability can be an important tool in analyzing customer behavior and identifying opportunities to improve relationship profitability. It is also an essential element in anticipating Customer Lifetime Value. CLV is a topic of interest to many organizations to help provide context around customer acquisition costs.
Maintaining customer engagement through digital channels is a significant challenge. When customers no longer experience person-to-person interactions with branch staff, that ‘humanized’ experience needs to be re-created as best as can be through digital channels. The use of analytics to generate relevant, personalized offers is the key to creating this type of engagement. Customers increasingly demand that companies know them as individuals, and there’s no good excuse for not delivering on that expectation.
There is a growing emphasis on reducing the number and size of branch offices to improve operating efficiency. Developing a successful branch strategy requires finding a balance between supporting digital customers with new technology options, and providing branch customers with digital options and enhanced human consultation capabilities.
