Matt Wilcox Pro

It was an honor to be asked to speak at the Financial Brand Forum. When people actually showed up to hear me flap my jaws, I was as flattered as I was relieved. For those who weren’t able to join me there, here’s a summary of my remarks, written by Bryan Ochalla, posted today on the Financial Brand website.

Courtesy of publicdomainpictures.net

Early in the 19th century, a young man was so taken with barnacles that he actually wrote books about them. One thing that captured his imagination was how easily changes in the water could wipe out most of a population. But he noted that sometimes a few barnacles managed to adapt and survive. These would thrive and overtake any space left vacant by their less fortunate siblings.

Perhaps you have noticed: banking waters are changing. Financial institutions that do not manage to adapt will find themselves losing ground to those better suited to the emerging environment.

Consider this recent report from Finextra.com: “At its investor day, [JPMorgan Chase] confirmed that the headcount at its consumer and community banking division will be cut by 8000 to 149,000 people this year.” That’s a wide spread as predictions go, suggesting an uncertain environmental future.

In another article, Finextra reports, “A third [of millennials] … think that they won’t need a bank at all in five years …” Where do they expect to obtain financial services? This telling statistic appears earlier in the same paragraph: “Nearly three quarters of America’s millennials … are more interested in hearing from tech firms about financial services.”

Note: not as interested in hearing from tech firms, but more interested. Today’s competition comes from the likes of Google, Amazon, Intuit, Paypal, Apple, and myriad others in or soon to be in development. I would be remiss if I didn’t add to the list retailers as well. Like, say, Starbucks, which boasts 10 million using its app for payment and tipping.

These are new waters, in which clients don’t require a financial services provider to have “bank” or “credit union” in its name. Indeed, at the moment, not having either seems to portend an advantage. Bank and credit unions, your branding challenge awaits you.

With 75 percent of millennials inclined toward tech firms, serving up relevant services in a manner that’s easy to access and intuitive to use is paramount. That, and—the newest water change—providing an enjoyable and complete experience. As demand for services delivered online grows, so does demand for extras such as live chat, prompt fulfillment, entertainment, information, discounts, privileges, useful helps, and more.

Happily, there is one thing a financial institution can do that a barnacle cannot. A financial institution can willfully change its DNA. It remains to be seen which ones will.

As for the barnacle aficionado, his father had hoped to make of him a physician and, failing that, an Anglican parson. It was not to be. Robert Darwin’s son Charles had a boat, the H.M.S. Beagle, to catch.

Part 1: Making it Digital But Keeping it Personal

Once upon a time, families gathered in living rooms and listened to the radio. Later, they watched TV. In the morning before or in the evening right after work, adults in the family perused the newspaper.

Or so I’m told. Whether or not that’s how it really was a few decades ago, that’s not how it is today. Families these days may watch TV together. Equally likely, they may divide themselves among two or three TVs in different rooms, tuned to different stations. Or they may not tune to a station at all, but instead stream content, possibly commercial-free. If there are commercials, they may watch them, or they may run to the bathroom, text, tweet, make a voice call, play Minecraft (or Angry Birds or Candy Crush), talk to others in the room, mute the sound, listen to music, check Facebook, scratch, peruse a magazine, what have you. In fact, they may do all of these things during the programming that the content provider fantasizes holds them rapt.

That, in a nutshell, is why industry leaders harp on the fact that you cannot get the same results from traditional media channels that you used to get. To drive new business and grow relationships, banks and credit unions need a spectrum of digital weapons.

My “digital weapons” list is long, so I shall mercifully serve them  up a few at a time. For today’s digital weapon, I want to focus on the seeming paradox of …

Making it digital while keeping it personal

Your clients want digital, but with a personal touch. Remember the rhetoric about banking as a relationship business? It still is. Preserving it while going digital only seems like a paradox. It needn’t be.

There is no reason you cannot infuse your online presence with personality. You did it back in the Dark Ages with print and broadcast media. You used strategy, tone, and design. Those basic tools haven’t gone away. They are as vital online as they ever were elsewhere. That means that besides making apps that are smooth, fast, intuitive, and functional, you must also design and word them so that they come across as uniquely you.

Here’s a good test. Mask the logos and names on your apps and on those of competitors. If the average client paying half attention cannot see any appreciable difference among them, you have work to do.

As for the relationship side, you have plenty of online tools. Though clients are no longer as willing as they once were to hop in the car and run to your office, they still want interaction with real people. It is precisely that problem that the likes of live chat and voice interaction were designed to solve.

Some companies are guilty of a serious error. They make live interaction options hard to find, burying them behind DIY options such as FAQs, help forums, and email options. The overriding message this sends is, “We’ll do anything we can to avoid interacting with you.” It is the antithesis of a relationship business. By all means, make DIY options plainly available, but make on-the-spot, direct contact via live chat and text equally so. Want to get really wild? Make your phone number easy to find.

Of course, this requires that the people at your end be knowledgable, empowered, and pleasant. Never underestimate that last one, namely, pleasant. Physicians have long known that a good beside manner reduces the threat of a malpractice action. Likewise, your clients will overlook “a multitude of sins” if they like the person they’re dealing with.

More “digital weapons” will be coming up in future posts …

This post is a reminder that tomorrow I’ll be participating as a panelist at Bank Innovation 2014 at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle.

Perhaps you remember the Bank Innovation people. You know, the ones who were kind enough to list me—ahead of Ashton Kutcher, don’t forget—as a “Bank Innovator to Watch.”

Our topic is “Advanced Bank Marketing in a Socially Connected World.” We’ll discuss:

• Creating a cohesive marketing strategy amid a wildly fragmented world
• The technology of “being there” at the right time/right place
• Quantifying return, realistically.

I’ll be presenting with Deva Annamalai (my former associate and current friend from Zions Bank), Eve Callahan (Umpqua Bank), and James Geeslin (Extraco Banks).

This an invitation-only event—click here if you’d like to be invited. If you’re planning on attending, please find me and say hello.

My Holiday Gift to You:

How to Filter Digital Media Content

I love digital media. As one who makes a living helping financial institutions marshal their marketing power, I’d be a fool not to.

Even so, digital media are a mixed blessing. They put mass audiences, once the exclusive province of the moneyed, within the reach of all. But like any pipeline, they care nothing about what flows through them. They deliver trash as readily as treasure.

This places the responsibility for sorting through the dump on the shoulders of individuals at the receiving end. Sadly, it is a responsibility that many neglect. Which is how bogus tales catch fire and spread.

Recent examples of fakes include a story about sending rude messages on napkins to a whiner on an airplane, one about an insulting message left on a check for a server, and tales of insensitive quotes from the celebrity or politician of your choice.

Some fast-spreading fakes may be harmless, but not all. As I write, digital media are spreading nonsensical anti-vaccination hysteria that kills children. Get-rich-quick schemes are depleting people’s life savings. False accusations are costing innocent people their jobs, marriages, and community standing. Bogus medical treatments are keeping seriously ill people from seeking appropriate care. Once limited to small, word-of-mouth circles, these and other instances of harmful misinformation now spread virally and cause real harm.

Who knows? The next bogus story to go viral might just be about your financial institution.

When trusted friends or generally reliable news sources post a story, how do we know what to pass along and what not to? As my holiday gift to you, here are three tips: 

1. Focus on the journalist, not the journal. With shrinking budgets, even many respected journals can no longer afford the kind of fact-checking that was once de rigeur. But over time you may identify individual writers who are more conscientious than others about checking their facts.

2. Use fact-checking resources. With a quick visit to sites like Snopes.com or FactCheck.org, you can confirm or debunk much of what you encounter in digital media. Both sites do a good job of sticking to facts and avoiding ideological biases.

3. Learn to spot logical fallacies. We are all prey to logical fallacies, that is, reasoning that appears to make sense but under scrutiny does not. A working knowledge of them can provide a shortcut to not being taken in. Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab offers a great introduction to logical fallacies.

Please share these tips liberally. Together, we might just reduce the amount of nonsense in circulation. And maybe even prevent a bit of harm.