Quintin Sykes

Speaking of Bitcoin, over on my company blog I posted a follow-up on some Bitcoin-related predictions that I made last May.

A couple of articles have come out recently in the wake of Regions Bank's announcement that they are offering online appointment scheduling. The latest is by Mary Wisniewski in Bank Technology News.

Appointment scheduling has come up on wish lists as I've spoken with bankers in the past, particularly in Wealth Management groups (financial advisors, for example). There's certainly a convenience angle for prospects and customers to be able to schedule a meeting without having to make a call or send emails back-and-forth. I like the sales angle that Vince Ammendolia from BMO Bank hits in the article, too:

Jim Marous has a comprehensive post on video-based customer service today, using Amazon's Mayday functionality as a basis.

Similar to a virtual version of Apple's store-based Genius Bar, without needing to wait in line or leave your house, a banking version of Mayday could provide both basic customer support as well as specialized or advisory services that could revolutionize both mobile and online banking.

Seems like every time I find something decent to read, Bradley Leimer's pointed me to it. I ran across American Banker Magazine's Big Ideas for 2014 in my Twitter feed yesterday thanks to him.

There's plenty to chew on from pop-up branches to promotional pricing to talent retention in the branch. One of the topics is implementation of an iPad application for commercial customers at State Bank & Trust in Georgia. Given they are $2.5 billion in asset size I'm interested in whether this was actually developed internally vs. an integration of a packaged solution. As interesting to me is the way in which the project was approved in 2013.

KPMG's latest community bank industry outlook survey was published in the middle of last year but I had a chance to review it over the holidays. It skews a little smaller than my client base but 1/3 of the respondents are over $10 billion so it's got some relevance.

Unsurprisingly, most respondents projected a modest (< 5%) increase in overall IT spending or an outright decline over the next year. Mobile banking/payments and leveraging data were cited by 2/3 of the participants as the most important customer growth-focused projects.

It's been a great first half of the year but the downside of being busy is that I haven't blogged much. I've caught my breath and am posting again. So, if you're in the mood for some recent banking posts from me then head over to the Crescent Consulting Group website.

UPDATE 31 December 2013: I'll be posting here again in 2014 with a combination of short-form commentary on the latest news as well as some regular long-form pieces that don't necessarily fit on the crescentmetrics.com website.

One of the more interesting pieces of news this week was the NCR acquisition of uGenius. I had the privilege of seeing this technology a few years back in some work with the great folks at Coastal FCU in Raleigh.

Video technology presents institutions with the opportunity to extend hours of service in existing locations and extend institutions physical footprint to locations that can't support a traditional branch. Banks and credit unions have also used the technology to increase efficiency during traditional banking hours by shifting volume away from on-premise tellers to agents in a centralized location, maximizing resource utilization.

My old webhost is changing some things up so it seemed like a good time to move to a more recent vintage of blogging platform. The template's not what I'm going for long-term but I definitely want something with less clutter. The default Octopress template you're looking at also resolves the issue with the guy preaching mobile-aware design actually having a website that is mobile-aware :)

As I was perusing Bradley Leimer's flood (in a good way) of links this morning, I noticed a recent piece on CIO Insight, 7 Ways to Prepare for the IT Infrastructure of the Future. I don't disagree with the trends discussed in the article and below, but there's more to the story than just ripping out legacy systems and tinkering with a few iPads so the CEO can check email.

In the last few days numerous financial institutions have backpedaled on their plans to implement fees for debit card usage. The general consensus since then is that banks will find other ways to levy fees with varying levels of transparency. In my first fee-related article last week, I questioned whether we've done all we can as an industry to avoid "feeing up". I was joking about potential new sources of fee-based revenue in my Bank Stanky Raises Fees follow-up, but was serious in the latter half of the article about some alternatives presented to alleviate the need for additional fees.