One of the truly sad consequences of the Covid-19 shutdown is the cancellation of the University of Colorado’s Graduate School of Banking 2020 session. This is one of my favorite events every year, and I revel in the opportunity to meet with and instruct future banking leaders in the areas of technology, payments and innovation. […]
Category Archives: Banking
Innovation? That’s Someone Else’s Job…
I recently read an article posted on PYMNTS.com about innovation that caught my attention. The article was an excerpt of a new study conducted by PYMNTS.com about financial institutions’ readiness for innovation. You can read the article here. Some 200 bank executives were interviewed. Here are a couple of stats from the article: 78% of […]
Don’t Inadvertently Limit Innovation
I asked 16 payments executives to draw a vase. Let me explain… I have been facilitating strategic planning for 20 years for one organization, PaymentsFirst. P1st is a nonprofit payments association headquartered in Atlanta, and serves financial institutions and corporations in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Their executives are some of the most well-respected […]
Being Strategic by Improving the Customer Experience
The issue of how you can improve the customer experience cannot be adequately covered in a few hundred words. Let me give two examples, one dealing with the digital / online experience and one dealing with the physical branch. If you are like most FIs, you have multiple online banking systems. Typically, you would have […]
Being Strategic by Reducing Operating Costs
What are the activities that a typical business customer of yours engages in that mostly manually and cost-intensive? Don’t know? It’s likely that, as bankers, we don’t spend much time thinking about the internal cost of our business customers. But there are areas in which an FI has a direct opportunity to reduce costs for […]
Being Strategic by Increasing Revenue / Customers
Let’s say you were interested in assisting your business customers in getting more clients, more sales, how would you go about achieving that? Consider that you have a significant online community, individuals and businesses that are connecting to your online banking platforms. While they are online, there are opportunities to make an appeal to them […]
Plan Ahead to Avoid Bone-Head Moments
As part of attending the FinTechSouth conference at the Mercedes Stadium in Atlanta, GA, I was asked to participate in a short video interview with Titania Jordan. Titania has a popular online channel called CONNECT, and along with her associates from 3Ci, she was interviewing numerous payment professionals in town for this show. FinTechSouth is […]
Why Banking is Failing at Cross-Selling Fee Services
I recently read an article from The Financial Brand outlining the problems financial institutions have in cross-selling services with associated fees. The article compares data from Amazon Prime sales to the lack of success FIs have had in selling fee-based services. They found, even when Amazon raised the price for the Prime service, subscribership increased. […]
Best Bank in Valdosta … and Not Just Cause I’m Sayin’ It
I referenced my bank, Citizens Community Bank (CCB) in a recent blog post discussing how difficult it is to be a bank. Many non-banks wanting to offer financial services find that existing rules and regulations make it difficult to do so. However, CCB performs a wide variety of banking services with a perfect blend of […]
The Innovation Challenge – Are You Up For It?
Most companies are well-run and operate with a reasonable level of efficiency. The very best companies, though, are not satisfied with being “just ok” and work to constantly improve, innovate, and evolve to enable creativity that leads to innovation-driven growth. I have written extensively on the need for Innovation-Driven Growth (you can check out these […]