Edition 50 - Is digital banking still 1% finished?

Hey folks, 

Happy birthday to us! 🥳🥳🥳

11:FS is 7 years old today which is just plain weird to me. 7 whole years of doing this stuff! 

We have built banking propositions and strategies as well as actually executing them in Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi, Dubai, New York, Chicago in fact pretty much all around the world. This includes here in good old London. Oh, London! How you’ve grown over those 7 years!

We’ve built a competitor insights platform product from scratch called 11:FS Pulse which is now used in 37 countries supporting hundreds of banks to make their customer experiences better!

We've delivered exciting projects around the globe changing the fabric of financial services by supporting our fellow financial services organisations to execute truly digital capabilities.  

And then there's the content. OMG, the content; 722 Fintech Insider podcasts; 20 Afterdark events; 128 Insurtech Insiders, 183 Blockchain Insiders, 899 videos on YouTube, a documentary, a million or more speaking engagements, thousands of blogs, tweets and now 50 editions of this newsletter! 

What a journey it has been and we’re just getting started!! 

I always get a little reflective around these times. We have operated under the simple motto that digital banking is only 1% finished and that we have 99% of this journey ahead of us.

Now there might be some of you who took a swift inhale when you saw the title of this blog. Those who have stickers plastered to your laptop or the slogan stuck to the wall of your office in a 6-foot print out - yes that really happened with one of our major clients! 

But honestly? I've been thinking the last couple of weeks about the dawn of AI and how actually, with how quickly things seem to be developing in order to replace, I mean, assist humans, it feels to me like we’ve opened up such a wealth of opportunity that we’re back either further. Feels more like digital is 0.1% finished. 

Let’s double-click. 👇🏽

Bot or not?  

I have to take a second to talk about the latest South Park episode. If you haven’t watched it yet (no spoilers - watch it!) the narrative follows Stan and Wendy’s relationship where Stan realises he can use ChatGPT to respond back to Wendy’s WhatsApp messages as it drafts what she wants to hear. 

It’s a win-win situation. Stan only has to input Wendy’s message into his app, copy and paste the response and on the other side Wendy feels heard.

All is going well until in real life Wendy brings up certain truths that have been shared that Stan has no idea about as he wasn’t paying attention to the content that was passing between them. To him, the action became a habit. 

Ekk!

This is obviously a wildly hyperbolic, albeit hilarious, storyline around the use of ChatGPT and I in no way advocate it as a way to keep your relationship alive (!!) but what it does show is that AI-enhanced technology can dramatically improve the way we communicate or simply create content for us.

As another example, I just installed Grammarly on my phone and it’s done a hell of a lot to make my ramblings not just make sense but be more inclusive, grammatically correct and generally readable.

If I bring this back to financial services then for years we’ve been living with the whiplash of digitised journeys that has done nothing but take people, paper and premises out of the process, and exposed all the technology and financial instruments to customers without an understanding of how to use them.

The warm feeling that someone is looking after you has been absent for a while, but with technology like ChatGPT enhancing the reach of human interaction and replicating that 121 experience, we’re into an age where truly digital has a new horizon.

3rd column search. 

You may have heard me talk about this diagram before. In order to contextualise how far behind banking is in its journey to digital we look across other industries that are making leaps and bounds. 

In the tech industry, ChatGPT has allowed search to take a running jump over that digital line where for years search engines have dominated the battlefield. 

In this model we’ve gone from indexing in physical books or library cards to boolean searches against websites crawled by bots via Google, to now a scenario where we have a service that becomes our very own author making us now the editor! 

Much like Twitter for news, this creates a hyper-personalised content-creating functionality that is uniquely catered towards the end user’s needs, as opposed to a scale of pre-written answers that the user has to trawl through themselves to find the best fit. 

And it won’t be long before people will use these responses as a single source of their truth which unlike with other people's content they have no responsibility to cite.

Advice 3.0. 

Advice really is the last bastion of the advantage a human can offer in financial services. Technology, algorithms, convenience and a number of other things being done better than ever via technology has replaced even the best human being. While in the advice space, the regulatory impact of the advice and the complexity of all of the data capture and then the plethora of advice that could be given have been somewhat of a barrier to entry for even the smartest systems.

This is why we find ourselves in a heavily regulated industry that forces customers to pick from lists through tenuous “guidance” processes that are not really set up to allow customers a great outcome, just that banks are not liable for the customer choosing that outcome. It sucks. People need help, not a list!

Gee thanks for the help. 🙄

So we’re at a point in time where advice is still broken and with the humans taken out of the process as part of digitisation, customers are left in a state of overwhelm.  

What’s interesting about ChatGPT is the specificity of an answer that you get when you ask it a question. No coulda shoulda woulda just plain facts scraped together from multiple sources across various data sources. Now those answers are not quite yet infallible (apparently I wrote a book called Bank 4.0!) but who are you going to sue?

Are we there yet?

This really could be the thing that takes us finally over the 1% but not yet. Right now we’re still in early development but it’s clear by how nervous folks are getting that the resource dedicated to making AI as close to the human brain as technically possible, momentum is building fast.  

This coupled with 5G and beyond data connectivity, truly digital money in the form of crypto and CBDCs, advancements in broader AI to allow algorithms to control people’s money for them and global advancements in regulations that allow the opening up of markets, data and opportunities to really serve customers like we want to.

Digital Banking is Only 1% Finished. It will only ever be 1% finished while there are smart people making things that move us forwards faster than the market can adopt and adapt to them.

It has been a privilege to work in this industry over the last 7 years. I feel like we have shaped little parts of it with the work that we have done for our customers and much broader than that of the community as a whole.

We all have a long way to go. It has been amazingly hard work that has got us to this point. It will be amazingly hard work that will get us from where we are to where we want to be. Let’s go!

Your stickers are safe for now.

See you next week.

Dx