BankerVision

Where is the HSBC Mobile Offer?

The results of the election in the UK have not yet been called, which means I still can't talk about some of the things I've got backed up. In the meantime, Aden Davies (@aden_76) provokes me that I should "write a constructive post with a dedicated URL to get us off the ventilator". So let me use the election hiatus as an opportunity to comment on mobile banking, and more particularly, the lack of it at HSBC.

A week or so ago, I downloaded the NatWest iPhone banking app, apparently the only banking app in the UK on iPhone at present. Why this is so I have no idea - in other countries like Australia, you're almost not a bank unless you have an iPhone app. Anyway, I downloaded the app because I'd heard rumours that you could use it to access your HSBC accounts if you had a NatWest account. This is true, actually.

I am a long-standing HSBC customer, and I don't mind admitting I'm a bit of a fan of Premiere. I love that I can move money around the world free of charge with instant settlement, and I like it that you get all these special spaces in branches. I even like the internet banking service, which, whilst its nothing that special, is perfectly functional and does everything, almost, that I need.

I am, however, at a loss to understand the complete lack of a retail mobile banking application. Not just for iPhone, but at all. What is going on HSBC?

I have a feeling i know the answer though. I'll bet that someone, somewhere, has decided that mobile is strategic, and therefore a global, multi-market solution is needed. I'd guess the whole mobile thing is so strategic to everyone that a big-bang approach seems the only way to make a splash. Never mind that you can build iPhone apps for practically nothing these days, and never mind the fact that everyone else has a mobile offering, even if its not on iPhone. I mean, even the DWP has an app these days, and we're the government.

The NatWest app, by the way, is pretty lacking in functionality, and it is based on the generic service that banks in the UK get from Monetise. They're the same people that run the Link ATM network, and apparently the app uses that transaction network to get its data. In other words, there's no integration or effort required to get the Monetise app to work for a particular bank, and is the reason that I can use my HSBC accounts in the NatWest version.

Anyway, whilst a mobile app from HSBC would be nice, what is striking to me is that the bank hasn't recognised that there is a need to get early experience in this space if you want to take the lead later. Shoving a poor application out the door - like NatWest have done - is teaching them valuable lessons about how customers like to use Mobile.

Moreover, they're building a committed and loyal base of customers from the ground up. These are early adopters who have no choice but to open an account if they want to bank on iPhone. There are only so many early adopters available in a given market, and NatWest are getting all of them. Typically, somewhere between 15% and 18% of any audience will bother trying something new - but they're the ones that will tell everyone else about their experiences. Recruitment of these people is the key to building a base.

And lets not forget that, as the only bank with an iPhone app in the UK, Apple have been shoving the app in front of everyone through their TV commercials featuring "there's an App for that".

Of course, all this is pretty incidental to the real business of retail banking if all you're doing is offering transaction histories and balance checks, which is almost all the NatWest app does.

But consider this: if all the early adopters are somewhere else, and then you decide to drop a major game-changing new feature in, who will be around to talk about it? Who's going to tell their friend and friends of friends how their experience has changed?

The point of mobile banking, really, is what the next generation of apps is going to be able to do. Contactless payments, point-of-sale loans, banking related geo-games and so on and so forth. The potential for integrating banking services into the day to day of life is the game changing play that mobile enables.

Too bad if you haven't got any customers willing to try those features though. Hurry up HSBC, if you want a shot at it.

Update: Finextra have picked this up, and and Brett King add his thoughts here as well.

Update 2: I was wrong about HSBC and their lack of mobile. They do have an offering for supported handsets (not iPhone, though), powered by Monetise. The link is here. However, I have to say, at this point, that I couldn't find out how to navigate to that link from any of the products I have, and furthermore, mobile doesn't come up in their search when you ask for it. Despite all that, I think I stand by most of the comments in my post.

2009: A personal review

Well, I’m back from Austria, and I can tell you, the skiing there was awesome. And I know those of you with families will probably be horrified to know this, but I have to say that taking oneself off during Christmas and not having to do more than calling a few people back home was just an amazing relief. You know how stressful all that Christmas stuff can be. We even skipped Christmas lunch, opting instead for a nice Goulash in a ski-in cafe on the slopes.

Anyway, now that I’m back, I’ve been thinking about 2009, and some of the highs and lows. Mostly, its been a great year.

At the start of the year, I was pretty sure interesting things would be happening. At Lloyds Banking Group, we were just gearing up for the big integration exercise, and no-one was certain what would be happening from one month to next.

The innovation team and I were still trying to work out how to adapt the innovation strategy given the number one priority for everyone was going to be incrementalism for the foreseeable future. Luckily, that was the strategy we’d already been pursuing, even during the boom times. For some institutions, and Lloyds is one of them, you simply can’t have a play-to-win innovation strategy and get away with it. So, as it turned out, there weren’t that many changes there for us. We just kept going on with Innovation Market and all the other things we’d started. I think we managed to achieve some valuable things for the bank.

Nonetheless, I knew that I’d be leaving the bank in 2009, but didn’t know where I’d be going yet. Sometimes, you just know that the time is right. Anyway, I’m firmly of the belief that when you’re an innovation guy, you really want to make sure that you turn your people over every couple of years or so. You want that fresh perspective, that new way of looking at things. Why should it be any different for the person in charge of the innovation programme?

By the end of January I was in a bit of a panic, because I was months late with the manuscript of Futureproofing and just didn’t see how I was going to get it done. So I started getting up at 3AM every morning to write, and now that’s a habit I just can’t shake. Lucky, actually, because my next book is now also months overdue, so the 3AM writing is back on again.

One of the highlights of the first part of the year for me was a trip to Australia, to attend Annalie’s AMPlify festival. I’ve written about it here before, and its a case study in my book. Now, the content of the event was interesting, of course, but it taught me a major lesson: you can’t overlook design in anything you do. Fit and finish is everything, and once you have that right, everything else flows naturally.

My current team are pretty sick of hearing me rant on about this, actually, and they also keep reminding me that just because Annalie had butterflies hatching out of chrysalides at the exact moment people were coming into her event on the last day, does not translate into appropriate expenditure in a non-corporate environment. Actually, I already knew that, but adjusting to the sometimes arcane rules of the public sector has been eye-opening.

When I joined the Department for Work and Pensions in August, it was a bit of a relief, actually. The bank had become increasingly difficult. Although most of us were confirmed in roles by that stage, there were constant announcements of reorganisations, teams being shut down, people being transferred, and of course, the “death by a thousand cuts” as we kept announcing round after round of layoffs due to integration. Everyone was on edge. 

Leaving was neither a simple decision, nor was it done in haste. After all, what would I know about working in the public sector?

Many of my colleagues in banking were somewhat surprised that I joined the civil service (“What on earth would you do that for?”), but it has worked out to be a rather pleasant surprise.

The fact of the matter is that there are few bigger IT environments anywhere. Neither is the innovation upside larger than here. To that, add the challenge of designing innovation systems and processes where profit is not the driving motive, and I think you can get an idea of why this move was so attractive to me.

I’ve been in post now for about 4 months, and I’m really looking forward to talking about some of the things we’ve been up to in that time. There’s really a lot that’s very exciting going on.

The other big thing for me in 2009 was the release of my first book, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank. I have really been overwhelmed by the response to this. I recall at the time I was sending it out for the last time to the publisher, I did it with complete trepidation, knowing that there would be nothing i could do it bombed.

Apparently, that is the normal fear of writers before they send things out.

Anyway, sales of the title are good, and my publisher is pleased. And word is spreading, so month on month sales seem to be growing at a reasonable rate in every country that the book’s avaialble in. Since the book is so ultra-niche, it is much more than I expected.

Anyway, that leads me to the end of the year, and my current projects. One of them, The Little Innovation Book, is an online set of essays based on my writings here in the last four years. Publishers – particularly mine – don’t like to sell things that are already in the public domain, so they aren’t very interested in books based on blogs.

But Future Proof Bank is pretty text-booky, to be honest, and I wanted to have something much more approachable. The Little Innovation Book will hopefully fill that need. I’m hoping to have it done and online in a month or so.

The other, much bigger, project I have on, though, is my second real book. Its tentatively called One Big Thing, and its about single innovations. In particular, based on a set of observations from history and more recently, I’m making the argument that radical innovation isn’t where the money is.

Neither is it in incrementalism, by the way, to those of you who know I am fan of small, sharp innovations done at scale.

Anyway, I won’t say much more about that right now, but will certainly keep you apprised of progress throughout the year.

So, for me, 2009 has been an exciting, and very impactful year. I am very confident that 2010 will be equally exciting. There is just so much going on, and I love it when its busy.

I’ll be back tomorrow with my top 10 predictions for 2010. I am quite often wrong, mind you, but I can’t resist joining in with everyone who always makes their forecasts at this time.

Actually, my boss at the Department has this down to an art. At every Christmas-do he has, he asks everyone their predictions, notes them down, and reads them out the next year.

I forgot to make predictions on the blog last year, but the year before I was pretty much wrong, wrong, wrong. Its much more fun to read back and realise how wrong you were than be right anyway.

The best of the season to you.

Terrible Innovator No: 6 – The Cowboy

The following is the last excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank in my series on terrible innovation employees I identify six archetypal innovation employees you should watch out for, and the last is “The Cowboy”.  From Chapter 9:

The final kind of innovator to watch out for is the Cowboy.  Such individuals are very, very committed to their innovations, so much so that no blockage can stand in their way. They go after what is needed to make the new thing happen, and they do so with gusto.

Unfortunately, they also do it without much thought as to what will happen after they’ve rammed the innovation down everyone’s throats.

If Cowboys are lucky, they’ll at least get their current innovation out the door and into the hands of customers. But in doing so they will have locked themselves out of being able to do the next round of innovation.  Cowboys are aware that they are burning influence to make things happen, but their focus is so much on the now that they don’t permit themselves to consider how they will deliver the next innovation, or the one after that.

I’ve met innovators in this category, in fact, who feel that if they can just get this innovation out the door, all sins will be forgiven, no matter how heinous. That, of course, is never true, because for every innovation there are both winners and losers. The losers will never be happy that the innovation makes it out the door at all, but the winners will also likely have a bad taste in their mouths: they might have a successful innovation on their hands, but to get it they were forced to do something they didn’t want.  There is very little upside here.

Another failing of the Cowboy is that they will almost never drown the puppy. They get so invested in one particular innovation (which they have burned a huge amount of influence to promote) that failure is not an option.  Even if the Key Questions turn out to be less than positive they won’t let things go. And they can’t: their personal success is tied into achieve this one, great thing. They have no choice but to continue, since if they fail, they are left with nothing.

That, of course, just highlights to everyone that their performance is sorely lacking.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Terrible Innovators. I’ll be returning to normal posting from now on.

Previous terrible innovators:

• The Gadgeteer
• The Talker
• The Consultant
• The Lone Ranger
• The Defeatist

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator No. 5: The Defeatist

The following is the latest excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank. I identify six archetypal innovation employees you should watch out for, and the fifth is “The Defeatist”.  From Chapter 9:

If you got to choose the kind of bad innovator you hired by mistake, you’d want the defeatist. The only danger that comes from having a defeatist innovator is that you have to carry the headcount without getting any return. The reason? The defeatist will look at any new thing and be so overwhelmed by navigating the institution to get success they are unable to do anything at all.

These are the individuals whose first response to any innovation is ‘that’s too innovative for us’. The problem of course, is that the defeatist doesn’t have the correct amount of influence to get what-ever-it-is accepted, and for some reason is unable to admit it.

Now, although the defeatist doesn’t burn influence (as they probably won’t get up enough courage to see anyone), they are insidious because they drag down all the good performers as well. Innovation is a tough game, and requires a great deal of self confidence and poise: after all, the innovator is going to face rejection far more than he or she will have successes. A positive outlook is essential. Having someone in the team who is negative just takes energy away from the main effort.

I’ll post the last archetype, “The Cowboy” on Monday, before I go on Christmas break.

Previous terrible innovators:

• The Gadgeteer
• The Talker
• The Consultant
• The Lone Ranger

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator No. 4: The Lone Ranger

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the fourth is “The Lone Ranger”.  From Chapter 9:

Another kind of poor innovation performer is the Lone Ranger. Lone Rangers are innovators who prefer to work alone. They like to have everything under their personal control, cannot bear to delegate any work to anyone, and need to be personally involved in every single, little detail of their innovations.

They imagine they, and they alone, are all it will take to get an innovation out the door. They engage in individual heroics to make try to move things along, but usually fail to deliver much because almost all innovations require a team of people to actually get things to happen.

The problem here is one of output. People tend to have definite preference for innovation styles. There are Creators, who come up with the new ideas. Perfectors, who go through each idea making sure it can actually be implemented before much work is done. Embellishers, who are great at selling ideas and getting people excited. And, most importantly, Implementors, who know what to do to make things happen.

The thing is, most people don’t have all four innovation styles, and are, at best, a great synergy of two. The Lone Ranger, of course, is no different to the rest of us, and is unlikely to have all four in equal measure.

Consequently, when they try to make things happen in isolation, they usually fail.

Naturally, this is never the fault of the Lone Ranger and his or her lack of teaming. There will always be an excuse for the lack of real output. “We aren’t innovative”, or “the business case didn’t work” or, “no one was interested” are typical excuses. There will always be excuses, and the number you get depends on how many of the innovation preferences the Lone Ranger is missing.

Lone Rangers are ineffective at best, but completely destructive at worst. Because they don’t want to share, they render everyone who relies on their particular innovation preference unable to function as well.

I’ll post the remaining 2 archetypes before the Christmas break.

Previous terrible innovators:

• The Gadgeteer
• The Talker
• The Consultant

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator #3: the consultant

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the third is “The Consultant”.  From Chapter 9:

At the other end of the scale (from the Gadgeteer), you have consultant-innovators. They don’t focus on the answer to the business situation (an answer that will, hopefully, be something innovative), and instead concentrate of defining the problem to be solved.

Now, of course it is necessary to have a pretty good definition of a problem before it can addressed in any reasonable way, but the consultant-innovator will write reports and requirements documents till the cows come home.

A key sign you have a consultant-innovator on your hands is that they will try to run ‘workshops’ to get a group understanding of a problem. They’ll attempt to produce facts and figures that describe it. They’ll always seek more data to clarify things. And then, when it comes right down to it, they won’t propose either a solution or a pathway to getting one.

The consultant-innovator’s hallmark is such a narrow focus on the business problem that they don’t ever get to using influence to push the next innovative thing. They’d much rather study the issues and create Powerpoint.

But the Consultant-Innovator is a deceptive creature, and that’s because (at the start at least), their workshops and problem definition work have actual value to stakeholders. Senior leaders call in consultants all the time in order to get independent views of their issues. Having an innovator do the same thing competently (probably for free) has an intuitive appeal.

Stakeholders, however, are unlikely to be thrilled with fact-finding that never terminates. That’s the danger of the Consultant-Innovator, and influence burning is the eventual result, as it was with the Gadgeteer.

I’ll post the remaining 3 archetypes over December.

Previous terrible innovators:

•  The Gadgeteer
• The Talker

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator #2: The Talker

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the second is “The Talker”.  From Chapter 9:

Now we come to the Talker, one of the most destructive of all innovators. The talker is a superlative communicator, and when you put one on a stage in front of an audience, you get inspirational words that create excitement for the innovation experience.

The Talker is also great at networking, and is able to get to practically anyone in an organisation. Usually only once, mind you, because the great failing of the Talker is they never do anything.

If only innovation was about giving speeches and taking meetings, Talkers would be the most successful innovators in the world. But unfortunately, it isn’t. There’s a lot of hard work involved, and a great idea may as well remain unthought-of if no one is going to work through the Key Questions to take things forwards.

Talkers, because they are great communicators and know how to open doors through their personal networks, will often have a greatly inflated view of their worth.  They imagine that because people are enthusiastic about their ideas they are successful. That, obviously, is not the case if an innovation team is being measured on actual changes they create.

Another thing to watch out for with the Talker is the regular status meeting with the innovation leader to whom they report. Because they are such great communicators, it is likely the case that the innovation leader will be lulled into a sense of security just because doors are opening that were unavailable before. The Talker will be excellent at doing smoke and mirror performances that make it look like progress is being made, even when it isn’t.

The key signal of a talker is that you get the same status updates all the time, with promises they are ‘close’ to closing new innovations. Or that they have ‘just one more meeting’ to get agreement. A real innovator would drown the puppy, and forget the ‘one more meeting’. Talkers, though, have nothing to back them up but the meetings they’ve been able to get.

As you’d expect, the Talker is also someone who burns influence. They do it at a great rate, because stakeholders, having met with them once or twice, realise that nothing is going to come of further interactions and stop letting innovators in. The Talker, who needs to get meetings to justify him or herself then moves on to the next stakeholder, where the same thing is repeated.

I’ll post the remaining 4 archetypes over December.

You can read about “The Gadgeteer” in this post.

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

Terrible Innovator #1: The Gadgeteer

The following is a brief excerpt from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, my text on corporate innovation. I identify six archetypes you should watch out for, and the first is “The Gadgeteer”.  From Chapter 9:

When you have an innovator who focuses most of their time on the latest and greatest technological thing, you are likely to have a gadgeteer. A gadget is a deceptively dangerous thing for an innovator. On the one hand, it seems the new thing (if only it could be sold correctly to stakeholders) would be a fantastic addition to the innovation portfolio. But on the other, there is practically no way to tie whatever-it-is back to any business problem.

This is the hallmark of the gadgeteer – a pursuit of new things without any conceptualisation of what business problem is being solved.

Gadgeteers are dangerous for innovation teams because they burn influence at a fast rate. It only takes one poor meeting with a stakeholder (who will likely ask ‘So what?’) to close that door to innovators thereafter. A door slammed in one’s face is one less avenue for the future to get predictability in the innovation portfolio.

But the worst thing about having a gadgeteer around is they reinforce a stereotype that an innovation programme must try to undo as quickly as possible: that innovation is about way-out things with little relevance to the business.

Whenever you spot an innovator continuously wasting influence pushing something that has no direct bearing on a business problem, its time to call it a day.

I’ll post the remaining 5 archetypes over December.

Reprinted from Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, published by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2009.

futureproofbank.com

Today, the microsite for my new book Innovation and the Futureproof Bank is live. There’s new content there, including the first chapter, the index, the preface of the book and the first reviews that have come in.

Go to www.futureproofbank.com if you’re interested.

Getting clout

A number of people have written to me, almost all through private emails, to indicate that they have a “clout” problem, and wondering what I thought they should do about it. Since it is a great subject for a post, I decided I’d share here, summarising what I’ve said to many via email.

The first thing about “clout” – especially the kind needed for innovators – is that you either have it by virtue of your position (i.e. you are senior in your own right), or you have it because you are associated with someone who has clout.

This is, by the way, why so many studies suggest that successful innovators almost always have the ear of the CEO, or someone directly reporting to him or her.

Let us assume, therefore, that you don’t have clout because you aren’t senior yourself.  And whilst innovation is important, noone at the top really cares enough to prioritise it over other things. This means the question really boils down to one thing: how can you prove to someone with clout that you should be closely associated with him or her?

I cover this in detail in Futureproofing, in which I outline a five step model that innovators have to go through before they’re going to be able to do much that is really impactful.

Firstly, innovators have to prove they can do anything. It doesn’t matter what, even the smallest of deliverables that can be talked about make a difference. Avoid the temptation to take on big programmes! Without clout, they will go nowhere. Instead, take on a few, small, but talk-about-able things. Make them work, and you can move to the next stage.

The second stage for innovators is building a network of interested people that care about doing things differently. Taking the small things that were achieved previously, talk to everyone, anyone that will listen, in fact, about how innovation can make a difference. Find the people that will help in the mission to do things differently. Offer them opportunities to participate. Recognise that one person – even a small number of people – is never going to scale. You need to recruit believers.

Why doesn’t an innovation programme scale when you just add employees? The answer is simple. The cost of an innovation programme has to be less than the returns it generates. When you add people, your costs increase. On the other hand, most things that are genuinely new never give you any decent returns in the same year as you’re paying your wage bill. By the time they are giving you decent returns, someone else in the business will be taking the credit. Trust me on this: you need to keep your innovation team costs as low as possible. Recruiting believers is the only way to get avoid this trap.

The third stage, once you have all these people helping with the innovation problem is making sure that you can get predictable. You need to make sure you can make a return routinely on the money your enterprise gives you for investment. It needs to be predictable, so that senior people can trust that if they make a bet on you they won’t look stupid. And, of course, if you’re generating real returns, they’ll be interested in holding you close, simply because you’re something that has the potential to make them look good.

Guess what, you’ve just managed to get some clout.

The next stage is using the tools of innovation to start influencing strategy by helping senior leaders rehearse important future decisions. You’d be amazed at how powerful that can be, especially when they find they’re ready to deal with something unexpected in advance. Do that often enough, and you’ll be invited into top table discussions to help future planning.

The final stage is one where you have enough clout that in your own right you can disrupt major business lines and get away with it. Bare in mind that this is the ultimate point of being an innovator in the first place: the job is saving organisations from themselves. Any operation will be disrupted by someone given enough time: the real role of innovators, therefore, is to ensure that such disruptions come firmly from within, where they can be controlled and managed.

Of course, it is this kind of disruption that causes the worst innovation backlash in the first place. That’s why clout is important.

Now, on average, you have only 18 months to get from the first stage to third before you will either get cancelled, or you will be personally tarnished as not effective.  I hate to say this, but if you’re in role for longer and you still haven’t got the clout you need, you’ll probably not be able to turn things around. You’ll need to consider carefully your options.

There are some, but I won’t go into them here. The point is, there is an urgency about doing all this stuff which many people don’t recognise. You are in a constant race to prove the value of what you do against the value of everything that the organisation ordinarily does. Since business as usual has an overwhelming advantage most of the time, it is a race that very few people win without help.

Now, one last piece of advice if you don’t have clout: get a meeting with the most senior person you can. When you have the meeting, indicate you can’t be effective because you have no clout. Offer to shut down innovation altogether, since “our organisation is clearly not ready for it”. Since no-one senior will ever allow themselves to be seen as “not innovative” this is practically certain to at least give you a chance to do something.

In the meantime, if you’re still trying to get those first few things happening, and you can’t, I’d suggest you try something smaller, commensurate with the amount of clout you have right now. I promise you, clout will build over time and comes automatically with success.