Are banks becoming victims of our fear?

Image by Erwin Lima on Graydon.nl
Although last week's announcement of ING to use client data for advertorial purposes backfired, the idea itself is not strange. The banking sector is losing its exclusive and valuable position as holder of financial information with companies like Mint.com quickly gaining information on the spending of customers. A friend proposed an interesting solution in which the customers receive a share of the profits of the advertorials since their data is valuable. It triggered me to look for other banks that implemented one of the IT innovations below in order to research moves like the one of ING.

I would be thrilled when you contact me if you know a case or people working at a bank which implemented a form of one of these IT innovations. The future of banking is irrefutable intertwined with technological advances, but where will this bring us?

• Software as a Service
• Advanced Analytics of Enterprise Data
• Enterprise mobile apps
• Automatic content recognition
• Gamification
• Big Data

Software as a Service
Application software provided as a web-application, used in a multi-tenant model and purchased on a pay-for-use basis.

Advanced analytics on enterprise data
Applying statistical techniques on complex data sets to find patterns and correlations between variables. Typical examples are outlier detection, clustering, pattern recognition and link analysis.

Enterprise mobile apps
Apps on mobile devices which support business processes, either for internal use or as a channel to customers.

Automatic Content Recognition
The ability of a mobile application to identify content within its proximity based on a sample (audio/video fragment, image of physical object) and through matching that sample with an online repository of all existing content. A typical example is an app from a web shop that uses the camera to identify the product it has in sight, after which it can be ordered with one touch on the screen.

Gamification
The use of game design techniques in non-game business contexts, for example by using points, achievement levels and leader boards. The concept is used to stimulate people to higher levels of engagement or to motivate people to perform tasks they would otherwise consider boring.

Big data
The use of data too large to be processed by traditional database management and analysis tools. Apart from volume, other characteristics of big data are: velocity (rapidly changing), variety (heterogeneous content) and veracity (certainty/truth of data).