From Passbook to Mobile: The Evolution Of The Bank Account
BY JIM MAROUS
“Some might argue that nothing replaces a face-to-face relationship. That assumes that a digital, mobile experience is inferior to face-to-face. And while that may have been true in the past, that’s not going to be the case in the future.
Welcome to the total disruption of retail banking”.
In 2009, I was visiting the head of retail for a major retail banking brand headquartered in Asia, and with a growing presence in the Middle East. This was 2 years after Apple’s phenomenal launch of the iPhone, and by this time the iTunes store already had close to 100,000 apps and had surpassed a billion downloads.
People were clamoring to get the iPhone, with unlocked ‘grey market’ phones available everywhere you looked in Hong Kong, Dubai, Shanghai and Singapore, because to that point, Apple had not launched the iPhone anywhere outside of countries like the U.S. But sitting in this executive’s office, you’d never realize it.
I spoke about the impact that mobile and social media was having on consumer behavior, and how dominant apps would become in respect to the way consumers would do their banking over the next 3-5 years. I discussed the breakout success of Bank of America, the first bank in the US to launch mobile banking, with millions already using the bank’s app daily to access their bank (and with 10,000 mobile users currently being added each day).
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