How to Build an Innovative Bank (Courtesy of Ally Financial)

Let us all give thanks to Ally Financial to revealing exactly how to build an innovative bank.

A few weeks ago, Ally launched Share Your Ideas, a forum on Facebook for consumers to tell Ally “how we can create a better banking experience together.” The resulting posts — available for all to analyze — offers nothing short of a blueprint for the bank of the future. We have waded through the posts to distill the features consumers want in their bank.

1. Remote Deposit. Consumers repeatedly requested remote deposit capture via mobile device. Just adding mobile RDC will make so many more consumers satisfied, the feature has to be on top of every bank’s current to-do list. As one respondent on Ally’s Share Your Ideas forum wrote, “Chase has such vision!”
2. Not a “Cookie-Cutter” Experience. This theme came up repeatedly and deserves notice. To paraphrase, what consumers are saying is, we know what the standard-issue banking platform looks like online and via mobile device — we don’t want that. If Ally [read: any bank] wants to be special, it has to go beyond the status quo with its applications. As Garrett Moore, a consumer, wrote: “This should NOT be a cookie-cutout website-based app. The experience should be rich, full, and tailored to the device running it for the best experience.” But consumers are also expecting that Ally’s mobile banking platform (the bank currently has no mobile banking) should excel from day one. “…I would rather wait for version 2.0, than mess around with buggy Beta versions and deliver ‘feedback,'” Andrew Link wrote to Ally. “Please heed our advice and put out an app that we are all proud of. One that can be a selling point for your company as well.” Ditto for other banks.
3. Use 4G to Its Maximum Capabilities. This point is similar to #2. Consumers (or at least those on Facebook) are more sophisticated about mobile and online apps than they were even a couple of years ago. They know that 4G creates new programming options for mobile bankers, and consumers can tell when a bank doesn’t go all the way with its mobile apps. Link put it this way: “I don’t want my info to lag when I have a blazing fast phone and connection.”
4. Make Ally Perks Mobile. Ally Perks is the bank’s money-back program for its interest-checking product, and clearly the bank’s customers like it, because they asked that any mobile app from Ally should have ample tie in to Ally Perks. The lesson: every bank should leverage its mobile app within the shopping experience. Jared Feuer, an Ally customer, got even more specific: “List [on the bank’s mobile app] of Ally Perks, but link it to Google Maps, so we could see who nearby offers Ally Perks.”
5. Speed Money Transfers. In another example of how consumers have wizened up, several participants on Share Your Ideas wanted speedier balance transfers between Ally and non-Ally banks. “One thing that holds a lot of folks back is the speed at which one can transfer monies between Ally and non-Ally banks,” wrote Wayne E. Powell, an Ally customer. “In this electronic age where a paper check can be processed almost immediately, it is discouraging when it takes three days to electronically move money between accounts. Very frustrating indeed.”
6. Customized Savings. Say you want to save for a few different goals — for example, retirement, a new car, and a birthday present for your loved one. Ally customers want that to be facilitated through their bank (which is not at all difficult, because it requires nothing more than “tagging” buckets of capital).

To me, the last idea regarding a customized savings account is not just appealing on its own but implies that consumers want their bank involved in their personal financial activity, ostensibly through an online or mobile banking platform. The message to banks: we would welcome your help, as long as we can trust you to help us without fleecing us. And that might be the greatest insight from Ally’s Share Your Ideas initiative; that consumers don’t have to have an antagonistic and negative relationship with their banks, as long as bankers listen.