In Mobile Financial Services, What Customers Want Matters A Lot

SAN DIEGO — In banking, the days of “if you build it, customers will come” are over.

That was one main sentiment expressed by John Thomas, senior vice president for emerging and electronic payments at Bank of America, during his keynote at the Emerging Payments conference held here this week.

In other words, banks shouldn’t develop products in mobile financial services because “it’s cool,” Thomas said. Rather, banks should deploy mobile services because customers need and want them. To put it another way, banks should first understand their customers’ needs and then develop technology that caters to those needs. Thomas said BofA is ridding itself of a product push, opting instead to listen to its customers to develop its mobile financial services products based on their feedback. Staying cued into customers’ needs is particularly important since they constantly change as technology progresses. “Customers are channel-hopping now,” he said.

Thomas, for one, has noticed that customers’ primary wants from their FIs also now include helping them save money while shopping. “This wasn’t even on the radar 24 months ago,” said Thomas, adding that the discount want also comes from BofA’s affluent customers, too.

“We need to deliver solutions well beyond traditional banking,” Thomas said. “Customers are telling us we want you to go places you haven’t been.”

Still, Thomas reminded banks that they can’t forget about other services, while innovating in new areas.

“Even though checks are going down, it’s still a big business,” said Thomas. “As we look at the future, we can’t forget about the core.”

Plus, mobile payments are still a ways off from ubiquity. Thomas says BofA’s forecast predicts that mobile payments will reach mass adoption in three to five years. When an attendee questioned Thomas about the bank’s NFC stance, he replied: “First, we’ll make multiple bets in the space.” Furthermore, he said banks “need to go beyond the single wallet mentality.”

While navigating the future of payments, he pointed out that the reality of a large institution is that its systems are not that nimble. Perhaps because of this deficiency, he recommended that banks remain open-minded to non-traditional bank partnerships.

“We can’t do it alone any more,” Thomas said. “We have to partner in new ways.”