Shades of Grey in a Binary World

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.

How would this work for a bank?

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…]

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…]