What banks can learn from Amazon

No one knows if Amazon will be buying a bank anytime soon, but more and more, it's becoming a shining example of how banks themselves should be running their businesses. Banks have embraced the idea that their own customers want new products delivered by new financial startups -- the savings and management apps, authentication and security tools and money movement capabilities -- but to truly put the customer experience first (as so many say they do) they should show the customers they're here to give them what they want. That means instead of collaborating with young startups on building technology, they should make themselves a distribution channel with different financial products -- just like Amazon does. “Amazon opens its platform to hundreds if not thousands of providers of goods and services and makes it available to millions of consumers -- they don't care what you buy or from who as long as you buy it from the Amazon platform," said Ron Shevlin, director of research at Cornerstone Advisors. "Amazon does have products to sell," like the Fire TV or the Kindle. "They don't care if you buy them because they still sell the iPad and everything else." It's probably a little out there for banks. But more and more, changing customer expectations and an increasingly digital world are forcing banks to accept the idea of open banking platforms. But they should also bring that thinking to their actual business model. Why a platform? Banks today don't care where customers buy their products, as long as they buy their products. But considering how many millions of customers they have, they don't have that many products and services to sell to them -- loans, credit cards, accounts. In a banking context, a successful platform would be one that attracts and matches both producers and consumers. It would give people choice without friction -- duplicate data entry, integration, having to paying multiple providers -- create new revenue streams for banks and offer opportunities for fintech startups to scale, by reducing acquisition costs through platform participation, according to Shevlin’s report, The Platformification of Banking. “The platform as a business model is designed to address that problem of enabling a bank to provide products and services without having to go into different partnerships and one-to-one integrations,” Shevlin said. “If you want to sell your stuff on Amazon, you sign up and you're in. It’s easy to plug into Amazon, and that’s the concept missing in banking.” Banks that exist today are one sided, they attract consumers and they're the only provider of services to their customer. When it offers customers a choice of products and services, they're bank-selected products and services. Fintech companies have trouble reaching consumers and banks have the challenge that they have this base of consumers but aren't able to provide them with a large base of products and services. Banks as platforms If banks are becoming platforms, these are the earliest days of that shift. APIs are nothing new -- they've been around for decades -- but in the last year alone, Citibank, BBVA, Capital One and probably others have made their APIs open to developers in an effort to innovative better and faster. They should also open additional revenue stream by monetizing offerings that run on those platforms. For example, a payments API that makes it easier for a retailer to do payments with a bank should inevitably bring in more payments. The bank takes a cut, everyone wins. But to be truly customer-first, the platform model shouldn't stop at technology; banks should move their consumer-facing business to a platform model too, Shevlin said. “All these API stores are pretty much technology-driven efforts without a lot of thought to how the business model changes,” Shevlin said. “How do we provide an interface to the consumer that shows there’s a choice? The banks aren't necessarily adopting this or embracing the concept.” There are some moves. In November, Citi launched its API Developer Hub. Mastercard, Virgin Money and others are already using Citi APIs to create customer solutions. If banks today are going to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world, their only choice is to become more open. Until now, banks traditionally have been closed off, not wanting to share their secrets of the trade. It’s been an enormous cultural shift for them. Now they’re becoming more open, but it’s important to recognize there’s a fine line between providing open banking as a service and merely outsourcing innovation, said Carey Kolaja, global head of product at Citi FinTech. “Our move to a developer hub and an open banking strategy is by no means a reflection that we’re outsourcing innovation or that banks will become the dumb pipes on which a transaction sits and not add value to our customers,” Kolaja said. “That being the case, we have to be realistic around why banks, including Citi, need to embrace new strategies with some of the fintech disruptors out there.” It might seem we’re entering a world where banks become the platforms that fintech startups plug into so customers can use those services more easily, more securely and with more trust — Digit and Qapital for savings, Acorns and Robinhood for investments, maybe a credit monitoring app like Credit Karma or NerdWallet, and of course, the Venmo, Square Cash and other payments services. Each of these apps uses APIs to plug into banks, that’s what allows users to interface with their bank account and register those details in order to open accounts with these various apps. It’s fun for now, the experimentation phase, but it’s not sustainable, Kolaja said. “I don’t necessarily believe that in the next five to 10 years we’ll end up in a place where consumers want fragmented financial lives across multiple apps, nor do I believe some of these fintech disruptors will be able to sustain their existence from a financial and capital perspective without broadening their reach into other categories,” she said. “There’s a convergence that’s already starting to happen.” Banks can only innovate so much Customers don’t care about that distinction between open banking and outsourcing innovation. They just want what they need and for that service to come as easily and affordably as possible. That banks are becoming more open with each other on a technology level doesn't mean they'll apply the same thinking to their business model. Considering the size of their business, the existing organizational structure and the fact that they are making money, it is highly unlikely a bank will adopt this business model. “When you look at what has prohibited big institutions from being successful -- besides process and not being willing to take risks versus being able to take risks – solving for a simple customer experience with minimal friction has been problematic,” Kolaja said. The more likely scenario is that a tech giant, like Amazon or Alipay, will enter the arena to sell consumers financial services, and existing banks will compete with those platforms, Shevlin said. “The large bank is simply not going to become a platform,” he said. “They'll go through all their technology exercises by opening APIs, but they're not opening up, they're not selling additional products or services or creating an environment.” A bank could theoretically offer its own services and be its own banking platform, said Tom Eck, IBM’s chief technology officer for industry platforms. For example, if it were a Chase banking platform, it would expose Chase services and could open all up as APIs, making it easy for developers to consume those APIs on a Chase-specific platform. IBM has a similar vision for an Amazon-like marketplace. It’s not consumer facing, but it’s a cloud based platform for financial services on which app developers and data scientist can come and build apps. Eck described it as a one stop shop ecosystem that includes fintechs startups, banks and insurance companies. “A bank could both be a seller of services while it’s also consuming services from some third-party fintech. In addition to IBMs own assets, we’re focused on attracting fintechs, banks credit card processors… You come to ours because you know you can come and access all these insititutions. You see the catalog, can subscribe to these services in one place and then we make it easy for you to build on our platform consuming those APIs.” It’ll be a significant additional revenue stream when it starts to monetize offerings that run on that platform -- effectively a marketplace fee. It will also bring value to the platform itself. “There’s an economic incentive for the platform operator because it typically extracts the seed for the use of services. IBM is a great new marketing and distribution channel for them, and it takes very little work to get them into the marketplace.”