Column Joris Peels

The last time I visited a bank branch was 12 months ago. My new ATM card had not arrived in time and the previous card had expired. Needless to say I was not a happy camper. The last time I spoke to someone from my bank was a few months ago when they cold called me to sell me travel insurance. I use their online banking tool quite a lot but have never really explored their website beyond this tool.

I would like to say that my bank is a personal financial advisor, an institution I turn to for advice. But, I can not help but feel that any contact I have with them either revolves around them having made a mistake in some way or them trying to cross-sell me some kind of financial product. My relationship with my bank is definitely one of “my bank and I” and not one of “us.”

Planning and budgeting tool
This is a shame. There is a huge opportunity out there for banks to leverage their relationships with consumers in becoming their personal financial partner. Better yet, banks could even do this with web tools and low per user costs.

Take Mint. Mint is a personal financial planning and budgeting tool. You can access it via your PC or even phone and it gives you insight into all your spending, debts and allows you to budget yourself. The company makes money via referral fees it gets when consumers switch financial products and is free to consumers. It gives people insight into all their spending via graphs and sends them alerts via email or text messages when balances are low or bills are due to be paid.

850,000 people use the service in the United States. That is 850,000 people that gave access to all their financial information to some website, online, some company they had little information on and no prior relationship with before joining.

Any bank already has the requisite information as well as the customer’s trust but I have yet to see anything approaching this functionality in an online banking application (apart from three year old demo I saw at Backbase when I worked there).

Another company doing more or less the same thing as Mint is Wesabe. Wesabe also has financial planning tools but a community element as well where people hold discussions about topics such as Restaurants vs.cooking or how to save money on a host of services.

Another variant Buxfer, allows college students to track spending, money owed to them by friends and divide up household bills. BillMonk does the same but alows people to use their parent company Obopay’s payment network to settle the debts.

Socialpicks and Cake Financial are communities that revolve around picking stocks and managing your portfolio.

Rebuild relationships
As banks have tried to reduce the cost of customer interaction by closing brances and turning to the internet and call centres, the relationships and bonds between banks and their customers have been reduced accordingly. By developing web tools that allow people to interact, learn collectively, plan their finances and save money they could perhaps rebuild those relationships. I for one would love for “my bank and I” to become us.

Joris Peels is the Community Manager for Shapeways, the worlds only 3D printing community and marketplace, you can find their blog here.