Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I can give you a couple of use cases from our day-to-day use of online banking. Some of our clients still like to pay by check. Even though we encourage customers to pay by online banking or wire transfer, we still get checks. We then have to get those checks deposited, so sometimes I find myself having to log in to the online banking system with many different keystrokes to ask if a check has been deposited. If I could do that by just asking Siri, “Can you go check my account and see if this check has been deposited?” I guess that would be quite interesting.

Mark McCormick: Yes, I think that’s a good example of how it might be useful. We have to figure stuff like that out.

SM: There’s a second use case. Fairly often, I find myself needing to transfer money from the main bank account to our PayPal account because we pay a lot of people through PayPal. So, if I could ask Siri or a similar digital assistant to transfer, let’s say, $1,000 or $2,000 or $5,000 from the bank account to the PayPal account, that would be interesting.

MM: Yes, that’s another good example of how it might be helpful.

SM: I think the real issue with online banking is because there are so many authentication steps, there are a lot of keystrokes that go into doing any activity. If there were a way to save those keystrokes, that would be interesting.

MM: I think you’re right. You know, we talk a lot about innovation, and I want to talk about one more big philosophical approach that we have, and that’s at the other end of the spectrum. We call it “fix the basics.” We believe that there are tasks that customers care most about, that they do the most often. We need to execute on those the most flawlessly. An example of that is we know that our customers log in frequently. Sometimes, some of our customers log in a couple of times a day, and certainly, several times a week. That varies, of course, but we get millions and millions of people logging in to their accounts, and the main thing that want to do is see how much money they have.

The second main thing they want to do is check to see if certain transactions have cleared. Those tasks we believe we have to execute on flawlessly. We’re always looking at the best way to make those perfect. That might not seem sexy and innovative, and we have to do it in mobile, but we don’t have it in social. But that’s the work of delivering a “wow” experience to our customers. They’re more happy with stuff like that than they are with super innovative things.

SM: I agree with you. As a bank, that’s your job – making a banking experience as good, as user friendly, and as convenient as possible. That’s where the real issue is.

MM: Yes, and sometimes the innovative thing is to figure out a way to do that that is just spot on and that everybody loves. A new way to do a simple task.

SM: What about the SMS and text space in banking? Tell me about what’s happening there.

MM: That’s another good example that’s facilitated in the most basic way. We’ve always maintained our SMS platform, and there are a number of different transactions, activities, or tasks that we facilitate just through SMS, like checking your balance or checking on a transaction. The newest thing that will be enabled there or that we will be working on [is being] able to transfer money to your different accounts.

SM: Would you talk about the trends in that person-to-person SMS transfer? We did a story on Obopay, We did a story on mCheck for India. MCheck was working with Intel and a bunch of Indian carriers. If you could, give us an overview of the state of the union in terms of the adoption of peer-to-peer SMS space mobile payments.

MM: I don’t have a lot of good insight into that across the industry. I would just be able to say that people do expect to be able to transfer money to people. The big trend is that people expect to be able to transfer money to people who don’t have accounts at [the same] institution. That’s why our new money movement service has that as a key feature.

Going back to SMS, yes, our new service gives you the ability to transfer with just an email address or mobile phone number. It’s sort of SMS, but it’s through the mobile device, and it’s partly enabled through just the phone number. The big trend is to be able to transfer to anybody, any time, anywhere.

This segment is part 5 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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