banksimple - (not) The Future of Banking (yet)
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what I think of banksimple.
I’d have about twenty bucks. But I digress. Here’s what I tell them:
I think banksimple solves a bunch of problems that don’t *really* exist. All the features in their demo videos look like nice-to-haves. Extremely nice nice-to-haves I’ll grant you, but nothing that would make me want to jump a fence.
See, at the heart of exemplary product design is a *real* problem solved. Dyson vacuum cleaners, iPods and Polaroid cameras all look slick and sexy. But that’s not all. Dyson got rid of the bag. Edwin Land gave you developed photos of your cherished moments in seconds - where before it would take days (and maybe allowed you to capture ‘cherished moments’ that mightn’t have gone down so well at the local photo stall – nudge, nudge). Steve Jobs made ripping, organising and playing digital music about a million times easier than any solution which existed before the iPod.
My point here is not to disparage banksimple (or ‘Simple’ as they are now simply known, having changed their name late 2011). No, my point is that banking is clearly a ‘target rich environment’ when it comes to problems that need to be solved. You don’t need to talk to customers of any bank for long to realise the wealth of opportunity in the form of real, pressing pain-in-the-neck problems.
It can only be a matter of time before someone solves some of these and seizes The Future of Banking. Will it be Simple, Paypal, Google, a dinosaur bank, a startup in a garage?
By the way, in my own humble opinion the place to start is with small business customers. They probably have the highest, most frequent involvement with their banks, and plenty that keeps them up at night.
No comments:
Post a Comment