At Fifth Third, Now What?

Want to know what is Fifth Third Bank‘s next move in customer acquisition and retention?

So would Fifth Third.

The super-regional bank, whose territory includes nearly every swing state in tomorrow’s election, has all the tricks of the banking innovation trade: RDC, mobile, geo-location apps. Fifth Third is also reaching out via focus groups, email surveys, and Skype chats to see what their customers’ needs and wants are. So when Bank Innovation asked last week what’s next, the answer was, we don’t know.

And we sense that Fifth Third, which has around 1,300 branches, is not alone here. The fact is that innovative banking tools are proliferating so fast and so ubiquitously, mainly because of the concentration of industry IT vendors, that to pinpoint what’s next is becoming exceedingly difficult. It is as if we have moved into a post-innovation phase, when everything innovative becomes anything but in a compressed timeframe.

Fifth Third and other banks have also hit this wall because some of the out-of-the-box innovations will required shared information between financial institutions and more sophisticated analytics. Banks want to share information about as much as Smokey the Bear wants a cigar.

The other factor to note is that mobile banking continues to grow at such a rapid clip that banks don’t need to reinvent it. The mobile user base at Fifth Third, for example, has grown 10x over the last year, the bank reports. With that kind of growth, who needs to know what’s next?