Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: A couple of questions there. With the adoption of Mint, are we to expect that all banks, like Wells Fargo, are going to have to present a Mint-like solution on their websites?

Mark McCormick: I like to describe it as the visual display of quantitative information. Instead of looking at quantitative information like your account in a list view, how can you represent it with colors, charts, and graphs that customers can customize? And yes, I do think all financial services institutions have to figure this out and make it dynamic and interactive.

SM: What is the current thinking in your world about the brokerages? Is the world of brokerages and online brokerages going to remain separate from the banks, or is that going to start merging?

MM: We have the number one rated bank brokerage site. In other words, for banks that also have brokerage services, ours is rated number one. We believe in helping our customers succeed financially by having the convenience of all of their accounts or financial lives aggregated and concentrated with Wells Fargo and making it easy for them to do that. I don’t know customer trends are around buying and trading on their own. It’s not my area. But it is the job of my team and other teams we work with to facilitate that process. Most important, it’s our job to make it easy to integrate with their online banking.

SM: In the online brokerage world, there is a huge amount of social media adoption happening. Active investors tend to also use social media a lot to exchange investment ideas, communicate, and so forth. What do you see and what is your strategy on that one?

MM: I don’t know what we’re doing in that area, but I suspect not much. I think if customers are doing that, they’re doing it on other sites or in other areas. I think we would be cautious about allowing our customers to talk to each other and share advice and build a social space around that for legal and compliance reasons. You might know more about how other banks are doing that, but I’d be surprised if that was a social feature in most brokerage platforms.

SM: A little while ago, we did a story on TradeKing, and they’re doing phenomenal job of facilitating a social investment ideas exchange. It’s a popular feature, a popular dynamic among active investors, to exchange notes with each other. It’s understandable. It’s obvious that people would want to know what other people who are playing with stocks and bonds are thinking.

What other areas of Wells Fargo are being affected by mobile and social technology?

MM: I think all areas of Wells Fargo are looking at this. We’re starting to realize that there’s almost nothing people won’t want to do, at least in the mobile platform. So, we’re looking at ways to mobilize what we call our public site content or our research content. We have thousands of pages on our public site where people research the products and services. First of all, we need to limit that to the right number and build the right architecture so people can find it. Usability is a big issue. But then how do we build the right templates and enable people to have an experience with learning about new products and services on their mobile phones? That’s not something we thought was a huge priority even a couple of years ago when we thought the mobile phone was mostly a transactional platform and a service platform. But to think of it as a sales platform, that’s a precedent. We’re looking at ways to do that. I think that answers your question. I know our wholesale group is looking at mobile technologies. I think everyone is looking at it. I think the question is what [department is] not looking at mobile technologies as a delivery platform. For some, it is their only platform. We’re recognizing that.

And we think of mobile very broadly, as all form factor supportable devices. That could be a three-inch screen, a five- or seven-inch screen, or a tablet-sized screen. We consider all of that mobile.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo
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