There is nothing like walking through the front door of your home after a long day at work or hard workout and being greeted by the aroma of dinner, realizing how hungry you are, and having dinner already cooked and waiting. Essentially what happens in that moment is that you are hungry and your husband, wife or roommate predicts your need and meets it before you are even fully aware it exists. Wouldn’t it be awesome if things like this happened all the time?

The banking industry is on the verge of change on all sides—retail, technology, security, customer landscape etc. As the banking industry transforms and adapts to technological advances and customer demands and expectations financial institutions have the opportunity to redefine their goals. The emerging banking environments are dependent on financial institution marketers and their vision for the future.  So what’s on the minds of financial institution marketers this year?

Can Savings be social? This article imagines a future where banks will offer the opportunity to share your savings goals, and watch your friends spending patterns… interesting. Another article sites peer pressure as motivation to save more. It says that ING and Citi already have comparison tools that allow you to see how you stack up others..

We just completed our second field trial of our KulaMula cash-back bill-pay system with 5 consumers brands who collectively conducted 852 20-second interviews with about 150 bill-payers.  The results for both brands and bill-payers were extraordinary with average offer acceptance rates well above 50% -- meaning that more than 1/2 of the brand-offers presented, after customization, were accepted by bill-payers.

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at a technology roadmap conference of Credit Union Executives. I've done a fair amount of work on technology roadmaps and appreciated the difficultly my audience had in answering the question, "what's the core value driver in the credit union industry and how is it measured?" One astute executive answered, "About half our customers care about superb customer service and the other half care about our loan and deposit rates."