It’s a Blurry, Blurry Banking Channel World

It’s all about context; including what banking channel consumers prefer using. An ATM user today, a mobile banking customer tomorrow.

That primary point surfaced this week while speaking with Tracey Weber, who oversees Citi’s North American consumer bank internet and mobile division, and other banks should take note of the theme.

“We need to have all of these channels, so consumers can manage their financial lives wherever they want,” Weber tells Bank Innovation.

But offering a myriad of channel options doesn’t mean consumers will rely on one only.

“All channels are important, and we need to help them work together,” she says. “Seamlessly moving across channels will be very important for financial institutions.”

The challenge with such an endeavor, though, is how fast technology develops.

“There are a lot of good ideas and never enough time to do them all,” Weber says. “The challenge is to prioritize and be thoughtful.”

However, that hurdle will only grow as the differences between online and mobile mediums become harder to discern, and the user base becomes more difficult to concretely define — especially as tablets gain prowess.

“Tablets are a very interesting opportunity for financial institutions,” says Weber. “They are not mobile and they are not internet — they are somewhere in between, and it depends on the person and the tablet you have. …It may skew more toward mobile or more toward online.”

Though that presents knowing-your-audience challenges, Weber says it also creates a number of new opportunities. Why? In short, tablets empower consumers to do more than pay bills and “more deeply think about managing finances,” she says.

Certainly, Weber is well tuned to what consumers need in the e-commerce world, as that’s her professional background. Weber most recently came from Barnes & Noble and also worked for Travelocity. Just shy of six months into working for Citi, Weber says there are a lot of digital world parallels between retail e-commerce and the banking version.

“The principles are very much the same,” she says. “The luxury we have in our industry is that customers bank with us and come to us to pay their bills.”

Which isn’t necessarily the case in retail e-commerce. And though that grants banks a better opportunity to build relationships, Weber says there’s also a “challenge of interpreting vast amounts of data from consumers, and how to make it actionable.”

Naturally, with an e-commerce background, her Citi priorities for 2011 center on continuing to enhance customer engagement and to help consumers better understand what situations may make online and mobile banking right for them. To help do that, Weber says Citi has been ramping up research to listen to consumers and observe how they are using banking channels, such as where they are going the most and how long it takes them to finish a banking task.

“We will continue to evolve and improve the customer experience,” says Weber.