Can Innovation Be Vanilla?

Can Innovation Be Vanilla?

By: Kate Drew

OCTOBER 15, 2024

One of the things we’ve heard over and over again recently is that now is not the time for adventures in banking. Rather, as one former regulator put it recently, “It is time to go vanilla.” This is largely in response to a tough regulatory environment, which has led to major crackdowns on anything novel in banking, following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. But what does that mean exactly? Is innovation dead? Perhaps not — perhaps it is just time for innovation itself to “go vanilla.”

The idea behind this is that there are innovations that are not particularly adventurous, and progress can be made under any conditions as long as it is concentrated in the right fields, and approached with the right risk-reward mindset. In the spirit of this possibility, here’s a look at a few decidedly less flashy areas where we continue to see activity:

Core modernization. Just 3% of US bank executive respondents to CCG Catalyst’s US Banking Study in 2023 said they had no plans to pursue a core system upgrade if they hadn’t already. This is likely because execs realize that a modernized core (whatever that means to your bank) is and will be critical to competing in a technology-driven future. Importantly, core modernization doesn’t have to include a major, risk-laden overhaul; it can be done through a phased, managed approach suitable for an individual bank’s appetite.

Data analytics. Data analytics represent the building blocks for artificial intelligence (AI), but an ability to leverage a bank’s stores of data to drive better insights and develop more holistic views of its customers is a long-standing imperative, and one that remains in focus. In fact, 80% of respondents to Bank Director’s 2024 Technology Survey said their bank’s leadership team and/or board discussed allocating budget or resources to data analytics in the last 18 months, making it the top choice selected.

Payments. With FedNow around for over a year, joining The Clearing House’s RTP, it’s galvanized the conversation around real-time payments. Adoption is promising, though it still has a way to go — over 900 financial institutions (FIs) are currently FedNow participants. But more interesting is intent: Also from Bank Director, 84% of respondents said they believe it is important to offer real-time payments to retail customers, 85% said so of small businesses, and 81% said so of mid-sized commercial clients. Meanwhile, service providers are ramping up their own capabilities to help smooth adoption.

It would be very easy to give in to analysis paralysis while waiting for clarity. But in the uncertainty, there’s an opportunity to innovate in smart ways. The above represents only a small subset of those ways — other areas may include digital account opening, modernizing risk and compliance, etc. Think, foundations. Eventually the pendulum will probably swing back in the other direction, toward more progressive innovation (AI is coming, like it or not). But, when that happens, those best positioned to capitalize on that reality will be those who used this time get their house in order.


Primary Bank Status Is Now About Data

OCTOBER 17, 2024

By: Tyler Brown

Open Banking

Nearly 40% of bankers in a study conducted by Bank Director said they believed their bank had at least 50% of their customers’ financial data. But that number may be optimistic given customers’ potential relationships with competing institutions and nonbanks, like neobanks and consumer payment services, that consumers also use to perform financial activities. That universe of consumer financial data will become easier to aggregate following the compliance deadlines for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB’s) open banking rule, and the final rule is expected soon.

The notion of a primary relationship — in which a financial institution (FI) is the source for most of a customer’s financial products and the first choice for future ones — implicitly includes customer data related to those products. FI primacy in this context is about which institution has the most and highest-quality information about a customer’s product ownership and financial habits. The spread of open banking in the US opens the possibility that collecting data via an FI’s products alone will not be enough to be competitive.

In this new age of financial data, it’s useful to examine the buckets of consumer data that exist and what data FIs might read from other FIs that supplements their own cache:

  • Customer data: Financial data that any institution that owns a customer relationship has — personally identifying information, demographics, address. It may include data like income and employment status.
  • Product data: Financial product ownership at the FI, terms of those products for the customer, and customer behavior regarding use of those products.

Getting access to product data from other FIs becomes important when a customer has relationships with multiple FIs, especially when those relationships include products that generate data of particular value to the bank, such as credit cards (which are included under the CFPB’s proposed open banking rule).

Using credit cards as an example: Product characteristics may include credit line, card balance, payment terms, fee schedule, interest rate, and transaction data. Those can be extrapolated to a customer’s spending power on credit, spending behaviors, debt tolerance, and payment preferences, but only accurately when the FI has a complete view of those products the customer owns at other providers.

An FI could use this aggregate product data from multiple institutions to better market products and services to their customers that best fit those customers’ interests and needs. There are two prerequisites:

  • Beyond the CFPB’s open banking rule, FIs need to think about “data in” as well as the “data out” that the rule will require. That will take a different set of APIs.
  • FIs must give customers an incentive to connect accounts from other institutions and share the relevant account data in full.

FIs may create this incentive by centralizing banking capabilities, like payments, or aggregating information into a holistic view for all accounts connected via open banking. Strategists need to start thinking about FI-centric open banking, even when the priority is regulatory compliance.

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