Machines are taking over me – I
Blog: End to End BPM
In the past weekend, I watched one of the last screenings of the Steve Jobs movie picture. The picture starts with footage of Arthur C. Clark, at a (probably) 60’s datacenter explaining to the reporter that in a near future, humans will have in their hands a miniaturised computer which they will have access to information. By the effect of the minicomputer intrusion, Arthur also points that future society will become dependent and blended with technology. This kind of assumptions are the ones that mark the character of a futurist, that can predict and envision years ahead what we are becoming to be, not the other way around, as we, part of a jittery, mouth-full instant communication global community, started to assume that futurists are the ones that can predict what it is going to happen in the next 6 months, or next year.
During the last couple of months I been in contact with at least two hands full of financial institutions. In most of them, the business initiatives around social business, ranked on top of their transformation programs, once they realised that letting customers blow to the horn when they are angry, damages the reputation of institution, as well as, social media should be used to serve the customer. With this in mind, banks wish to have an upgrade of the brand new 360 degree view of the customer. Hence, in the CRM system, apart of the account statements, the financial products the customer subscribed, it will integrate his social media feed, with social listening and sentiment analysis features. There is nothing new on this, the novelty is the customer profile built around the what we know about him, taking into consideration the spending partners, the investments done, the risk profile, combined how he expresses in social media, builds who the customer is. Or not.
Technological advances have open the door in the emergence of services that perform financial advisory services. Despite there are some regulation barriers to comply, the financial personal assistance is here to stay. The financial assistant, leveraged among others by machine learning, high performance computing and natural language processing are able determine the best investment needs, your tolerance to risk and what are your goals to be achieved. However there is some room for improvement on adjusting to investment portfolio or your debt stack taking into consideration portfolio diversification or futures in economy growth or income fluctuations. One of the biggest barriers to break is the fact that customers operate with multiple banks and such kind of intelligent advisory services stumble in the lack of open interoperability. Last, there is an emotional factor, which is, the human lifecycle phase that dictates our inherent needs and wants. Someone that is heading retirement have very different needs from the ones that are starting their professional life. And some humans do not want to retire at all, despite there are in a certain age.
Luciano Fiordi, in his book called the fourth revolution, quickly points one of the foundational philosophical well-know distinction between who we are – let us call this our personal identities – and who we think we are – call this our self-conception. The two selves-our personal identities and our self-conceptions – flourish only if they support each other in a mutually healthy relationship. Things get more complicated because our self-conceptions, in turn, are sufficiently flexible to be shaped by whom we are told to be, and how we wish to be perceived. Hence, the dream that bankers have about understanding who are you and how they can serve you better, it is still far for reality. This should not only be a reflection point in the banking industry, as well as across the mass market verticals. For those industry sectors like retail that are in the forefront of understanding customer behaviour it could be interesting for banks to carry a join design experience on who the customer really is. There is still a very long road ahead how to better serve bank’s customers.
Filed under: BANKS, BPM, Complex Adaptive Systems, Enterprise Architecture, Social Tagged: Banks, BPM, Complex Adaptive Systems, Enterprise Architecture, Social 
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