Today, Alex Payne wrote the following:
Imagine, for a moment, a bank that doesn’t suck.
A bank that doesn’t gouge you with fees.
A bank that doesn’t treat you like crap.
A bank that cares about design, but gets out of your way.
A bank that puts your money to work automatically.
A bank that’s building a platform for the future of personal finance.
Sounds utopian, no?
I’ve imagined that bank, usually while on hold with my current bank after they’ve screwed something up. I want to be a customer of that bank. More than that, I want to make it happen.
So, I am.
Scratching the creative itch is one of the attributes I admire the most in people. And making a bank that behaves somewhat human is something I applaud wholeheartedly.
Alex Payne is joining BankSimple as a co-founder, with the role of Chief Product & Technology Officer, which is fine and dandy. I hope he’s read this post by Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame) about how he’d like to run a bank:
Basically, he’d make sure the bank is safe, not too big, facilitating the features in today’s smart phones and make sure they’re different than everybody else. Matt is thinking as a business owner, and therefore focus a lot on how to create PR stories, but he’s on to the notion of a bank that is setting itself apart from the others by just acting differently. Humanely. E.g. by turning away money, so every customer won’t be able to put more than $250,000 in their account, because that’s the insured limit.
A Danish bank, Danske Bank, is spending 1,000,000,000 Danish Kroner ($170,000,000) on digital services (internet banking, website etc.) over the next two years.
They say they’ll make their internet banking service hardware independent (so it can run on the iPhone, Android – yes, even the Palm Pre andwhathaveyou) and focus a lot more on not only being transaction oriented, but give opportunities in trading, advice etc.
What I fear, though, is that they’re not disruptive enough.
They are putting 400 developers on the job (Danske Bank is Denmark’s biggest IT-company measured by employers so they have this amount of people lying around, I imagine), but it’s people who come from the financial sector and are not used to being user-focused as Alex Payne has gotten used to being at Twitter. You could argue he is not used to focus on hardcore financial transactions security either, but I’m one of those internet users that go for anything that tries to rattle the cage a bit.
The only problem is that I’d probably have to move to the US if I want to have a piece of that bank…
Why am I blogging this?
I believe strongly in disruptive movements, and I think one of the untapped markets is the financial sector – especially in Europe. There’s plenty of room to be innovative and do things differently. Heck, just by being different you’re almost bound to be better than what we’re stuck with now. I’d love a bank that got the hell out of my way when I don’t need it, and once I do, don’t remind me constantly how much they think of me as just another customer.
Read a bit more about Alex Payne’s announcement.