Instant Gratification

The future of banking has been decided, or at least it has for the Commonwealth Bank.

Last week the bank released a curious and high production video which looked at a bold, digital, always-on future.

The thesis of the video seems to be that the CBA will provide a future in which banking services are easy to understand, always accessible, highly secure (finger print ID scanning on your personal digital device no less) and deeply personal.

In one video the bank has addressed almost all the needs of mass affluent and high net worth consumers – access, ease and advice – and delivered a promise of banking utopia, the bridge between the personal control and responsibility that online banking offers and the advice generated by banking experts, and all of this in three years.

The truth is that while all of the technology in the video already exists – and many more interesting and powerful tools are already in development and in some cases being trialled, and that of all the banks the Commonwealth is moving fastest and most aggressively in this space – this vision is likely to be another promise that isn’t delivered and will only increase the customer dislocation.

One of the by products of working in customer research and constantly polling the market is that at CoreData we sit on top of literally rivers of data about customer engagement, satisfaction and intention and at the moment we can tell that this picture badly misreads what customers are thinking.

A year and a half after the grimmest months of the Global Financial Crisis, bank customers still are having a hard time believing that banks (a) Care about them (b) Can demonstrate more than a simple utility and (c) Have any vision of the future which isn’t related to their profit.

Last week CoreData was conducting high net worth Focus Groups (customers with more than $1 million of investable assets outside their home and superannuation) and we were trying to examine their relationship with their bank.

The short answer is: there wasn’t one. Given that we conduct this research annually, we looked back to the 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006 data from the same research and customer engagement among the rich has fallen so substantially in Australia in that time that the casual observer might contend that the banks had simply abandoned the segment.

Given the gap between customer sentiment and the promised future, is it any wonder that the gap between what people believe about the banks and what the banks believe about themselves has become a yawning chasm?