Bank Innovation’s Top 3 Posts in January
January marked a busy start to the year for banking and fintech. It was a month full of acquisitions and deals in the fintech space, as well as plenty of earnings reports from some of the biggest banks in the U.S. indicating digital shifts large and small are paying off.
But which Bank Innovation stories caught the attention of BI’s readers? Below are our three top posts for the month, determined by views as well as editors’ choice, in no particular order.
BMO Harris Bank’s rollout of online and mobile upgrades ran into technical difficulties and locked some of the Chicago-based bank’s customers out of their digital accounts, some for longer than a week.
Hundreds of customers took to Twitter complaining they were having trouble logging in and demanding answers from the bank. But BMO Harris kept calm and carried on, replying to tweets one-by-one, offering individual support for each customer through a private channel.
Also see: What to Do When Your Banking App Stumbles Out of the Gate
Even with glitches aside, some customers seemed to be less than pleased with some of the changes to the bank’s digital offerings.
One customer asked where an online feature allowing users to create categories for transactions went. “That was extremely useful and I am a bit annoyed that it’s gone,” the customer tweeted. The bank replied the feature is “no longer available” on the online banking platform but that it does “offer the option to download your activity off-site in order to manage/categorize your transactions.”
When fintech provider Fiserv announced it would purchase payment processor First Data Corporation in a massive $22 billion deal, the fintech world just about exploded with praise, fear, dismissal, and predictions.
A source told Bank Innovation that while the new Fiserv would be a behemoth, it wouldn’t spell the demise of other technology providers.
“Deals of this size are all-consuming,” the source said. “On the surface, this looks great, but if competition can stay focused, they can make up ground against” Fiserv as it works to complete the massive integration.
The deal also comes with a hefty investment in innovation — $500 million over five years — funded in part from cost synergies. The investment will tackle “digital enablement,” advanced risk management, e-commerce, next-generation merchant solutions and data-focused solutions, the companies representatives said.
The companies project combined annual revenue of $14.6 billion.
Now that America’s homes are decluttered, what does that mean for its phones and the standalone apps like Venmo that reside on their home screens?
In today’s world, decluttering Marie Kondo-style — discarding things that are no longer useful — is not just for the physical world, but the digital world, too. Millennials are also more careful than older generations about giving precious screen space to apps — 54% have all their apps accessible in the first two screens of their phones, compared with 37% of Baby Boomers, according to Comscore’s 2017 mobile app usage report.
“People are realizing that they have way too many apps on their phones,” a source told Bank Innovation. “Consumers want one comprehensive financial services app where they can do everything in one place in a seamless, easy and secure fashion.”
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