I’m probably going to offend someone with this post. It is of course not my intent.
Wouldn’t it be a cool idea for a bank to create an app that helps to minimize fees. You can imagine they know enough about your cash flow and spending habits to help you minimize or eliminate fees.
Of course, if you presented this idea to “the business” they’d freak. “How can we minimize fees?!”, they’d ask, “That’s how we keep the lights on.”
My answer? Simple: [Read more…]
API’s present a great opportunity to change the way technology solutions are delivered to the market. For a few days, I’ve been talking a lot about how API’s enable companies to abstract out the user experience of their mobile apps from their core back end systems as a way to create more personal connections with customers and to drive more value out of mobile applications.
Coincidental to my pulling out this particular soap box, Amazon & Samsung announced a great example of how this works.
Amazon is creating a “special app for Samsung”… With a whole new business model specifically targeting Samsung customers – it’s not just a “white label Amazon book store”, it’s a whole new model – readers can choose one book a month for free out of a selection that Samsung decides.
Perhaps the bank is focused on business clients. They realize that one of the ways they compete is by creating a more personal relationship with customers than their competitors can create.
With API’s, it’s possible to create a custom app for their largest customers tailored to their individual needs and the specific features of the bank that the customer is signed up to use. Such a personalized app strengthens the relationship between the bank and their customer. It’s lets the customer more easily extract value from the bank because the app is tailored to their needs.
It goes without saying [Read more…]
Read down to the bottom of BGR’s post about Samsung’s fingerprint being hacked.
See the part that says:
We can simply deactivate the key from a lost or stolen device, and you can create a new one.
Reminds me of this story about Fedex shipping fraud, where Fedex probably thought:
We’ll email a user each time their account details change so that if the accounts has been compromised & details fraudulently changed, we’ll know and be able to simply re-secure the account.
It’s the word “simply” that really gets me riled up. You see… Fedex couldn’t simply lookup my account by email address, so we couldn’t figure out what account was compromised. I can’t believe I’m the first victim with a similar story.
It’s never as simple as it sounds, and that’s a huge risk to organizations thinking about mobile payments.
Listen to any bank analyst call and executives will be talking about technology and/or how they’re competing with silicon valley. Even if you don’t listen, but simply pay attention to what’s happening you’d realize that banks are just software companies with banking licenses.
Most of us have heard of Square. The mobile phone & tablet accessory that lets anyone accept credit cards. Of course, if you listen to how they talk about themselves, they’re a payment platform. (Sounds like a bank would want to be a payments platform, right?) [Read more…]
