Below are interesting stories the Banking.com staff has been reading over the past week. What have you been reading? Let us know in the comments section below or Tweet @bankingdotcom.
- Digital Wallet Race Is Far From Over
Payments players with digital wallet aspirations — including Visa, MasterCard, Google, PayPal, Apple and Isis — are all vying for customers’ virtual pocket books in a race to truly electronic transactions. Yet none have had much luck, so far. There have been delays in launches (e.g. Isis’s delays on launching in its two pilot cities); changes in the way at least one major, digital wallet innovator processes its transactions (think: Google Wallet); and, most importantly, a lack of features appealing enough to spur widespread adoption. “Mobile wallets have been around for a while, and even for us, in the industry, we are only just starting to adopt these technologies,” says Philip Philliou, a payments consultant. “I don’t think anyone is far ahead in terms of disruption. We are still early on.”
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- 3 Things Banks Must Do to Survive the Mobile Payments Jungle
The mobile wallet market appears to be wide open to new entrants, with banks having a slight edge. While more than 20 percent of U.S. online consumers prefer to use their checking account for digital wallet services, 17 percent prefer PayPal, according to Gartner. That gap could quickly close in the next few years. To survive in the mobile payments landscape, banks need to do three things: Integrate mobile into existing offerings. Rebuild loyalty. Banks need to leverage emerging customer analytics techniques, coupled with geo-location services through mobile devices in order to make relevant offers at the right time. Redefine success. It’s no longer sufficient for banks to measure success by counting the number of mobile payments and online users.
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- All Those New Channels Affecting Accuracy of Data
Credit unions face many challenges as channels diversify and members demand digital options. According to a recent Experian QAS survey, financial institutions are operating through an average of four different channels, the most popular being the organization’s website. While these new channels are exciting endeavors, many credit unions are experiencing problems with collecting accurate contact data. According to that same data, 91% of financial institutions suspect their customer/member and prospect data might be inaccurate in some way. On average, respondents think that as much as 18% of their data might be inaccurate. Even worse, another 27% of respondents are unsure how much of their data is inaccurate.
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- Introducing The Social Media Power 100 Rankings For Banks And Credit Unions
The Power 100 is an interactive list of retail banks and credit unions who have achieved the most social media traction. Components of the Power 100 score include Facebook ‘Likes,’ Facebook engagement rate, Twitter followers, tweets sent, YouTube views and YouTube subscribers. The top 15 institutions in the banking and credit union category are as follows: Chase, Capital One, ICICI Bank, E*TRADE Bank, Bank of American, Axis Bank, GT Bank, Wells Fargo, Citi, Commonwealth, FNB, Navy FCU, Bank of Nova Scotia, NAB and TD Canada.
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- DDoS: The Worst Case Scenario
Javelin Strategy & Research Blog
Since September of last year, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam has engaged in cyberwarfare against U.S. financial institutions, and it is a war with which they have had a great deal of apparent success if we believe that their goal was to inconvenience U.S. bank customers by rendering online banking portals inaccessible for a number of hours at a time. More than information sharing on best practices is needed – financial institutions should pool resources to ensure the availability of excess network capacity, and network operators must be involved in the effort to identify infected servers and to subsequently stop the malicious traffic its source. And while intelligence support is a good start, the Federal government must identify those responsible and cripple their ability to continue this campaign.
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- Facebook tries to get more in your face
It’s hard not to detect a whiff of desperation in Facebook’s new please-don’t-go interface, which is determined to keep people within the social network as long as it can. Facebook Home is intended to dominate Android smartphones, making Facebook your first and last port of call as you traverse the wireless wonderland. It will keep Facebook features front and center, rather than require users to use an app.
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- Credit Union Takes an Early Lead with E-Signatures
Aaron Pugh recently published a story on credit unions using e-signatures on CreditUnions.com. He writes that only eight and a half percent of credit unions larger than $20 million in assets currently offer e-signatures to their customers even though the market for e-signatures as a whole has shot up 48 percent from 2011 to 2012 according to Gartner Research. Among the early adopters in the industry is the Teachers Credit Union in Ontario, Canada. The member-owned financial organization serves employees of education and their families throughout the province. The 15,000 members conduct business through multiple branch locations, ATMs, online and via mobile banking.
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