The big hurdle Bank’s have to get over is the dichotomy between finite investment dollars based on Stock Market expectations, and customer driven channel investment.

The answer has to lie in choices, so its understandable that in this predicament, bankers will fall back on what they know, hence the theme I see of branch vs internet.

However open standards, and integrated architecture models ought to provide the capability to do both. Internet has one enormous advantage over previous technologies in that it can be built once, and used/ exposed in multiple channels. This is an important concept, but it also presents new sets of problems.

1. confidentiality:  exposing internal information to customers, especially ‘qualitative’ information, such as customer notes
2. usability and understanding:  there is no CSR to translate and represent the information to the customer
3. categorisation:  tags, and references are new concepts to Banks but this is the way to reference that which is internal, and that which is external.