iFinance

What is your institution doing in regards to remote deposit? Are you focusing on mobile banking? Clearly, this presents a huge opportunity in the near future for financial institutions.

I recently came across an article on The Financial Brand that touched on 25 things more important than online social media. If you get a moment, go take a look at leave your feedback. My main argument against the post is that a majority of what’s listed, should be an integral part of a financial institution’s social strategy.

Listening

The true value with social comes when a brand listens. If you aren’t online, how do you know what your customers are saying about you? How do you know the sentiment behind the conversations that your customers and potential customers are having if you aren’t actively engaged with social? A few weeks ago, I noticed a tweet from one of my followers that expressed his frustration with a previous employer of mine. Knowing that my previous employer wasn’t active on Twitter, I witnessed a simple issue/concern go unsolved. I eventually reached out to my follower and gave him some recommendations, but this was a massively missed opportunity.

Furthermore, I had been monitoring conversation around my previous employer and a simple hashtag search pulled up countless tweets – everything from simple questions to negative comments – that were unattended and getting no response. And this was only on one platform. If it’s happening on one, it’s probably happening on others.

In regards to the article I mentioned in the beginning, if you aren’t on social platforms and monitoring conversation around your brand, you might be missing important information about mobile banking, remote deposits, branch concerns. Maybe you create a discussion on Facebook asking your customers their thoughts on your website, maybe you ask about their interest in remote deposit. But again, without being online, you’ll never know.
Continue reading Why social media matters in finance

Wells Fargo, one of the more active financial institutions in the social space, recently launched a new Facebook Page called With You When. With you when…when you’re confused? Because that’s exactly what I am. I applaud the effort, but this clearly misses the mark for Wells Fargo.

Per their info tab:

Welcome to the Wells Fargo ‘With You When’ page. When you were a kid did you want to be an astronaut, a cowboy or maybe a ballerina? While your dreams may have changed since you were a wide-eyed youngster, you’re still thinking about your future. Wells Fargo is here to help you realize those dreams. We were with you when you opened your first savings account and wrote your first check, and we’re with you now as you continue to make the decisions that make your future a reality. We are the Wells Fargo team that will be posting updates on the page and responding to your comments, as well as letting you know about releases of cool new tools for smart money management.

When I was a kid, I didn’t have any financial obligations. When I was a kid, banking was the last thing on my mind. I assume Wells is trying to make finances more fun, and is attempting to help calm the frustration and stress that comes with banking. However, why create a separate Facebook account? In my opinion, it’d make more sense to create a separate tab within their existing account for this cute approach.
Continue reading Wells Fargo launches ‘With You When’

I was tipped off on this article by Paul Jonas regarding a recent survey of community banks indicating that mobile banking remains a top priority over the next 18 months.

The articled featured an interesting set of data that is surprising and encouraging:

Eighty-nine percent of the community bankers polled in a nationwide survey said they are considering some form of enhancement to their existing platform. That includes 54% looking to design a mobile application for a smartphone, such as an iPhone, and 35% planning to add some type of functionality to their existing platform. At the same time, 9% of bankers said they were going to change their provider, and 4% were discontinuing the service altogether.

What surprises me, is the overall focus on mobile within the community bank space. While mobile certainly remains an untapped space for a lot of financial institutions, I would assume that improving their online banking platform would be of higher priority at this point. Then again, if the trend is shifting toward mobile, is online banking that important  for today’s bank customer?
Continue reading Community banks focusing on mobile

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Discover about their social media efforts and how they are utilizing a variety of platforms to engage their customers and share the Discover brand.
Discover has a pretty active online presence. Talk about the different strategy Discover has with Twitter & Facebook vs the Discover blog?
One of our [...]

Via American Banker

Not much surprise on the mobile performance indicies. Would assume Wells Fargo to improve as time goes on, but the major players are there.

MasterCard’s ‘ATM Hunter’ application has been getting mixed reviews in Apple’s iTunes store, according to a recent article on American Banker. With Monday’s release of the Blackberry application, MasterCard officials are quickly to comment on “significant pick up in downloads.”
Not everything is as rosy as MasterCard claims though, as the iPhone application – which has [...]