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Re: high-touch -- it's not an age thing. It's a user experience thing. People sometimes go into a bank knowing exactly what they want. More often, people don't

Re: high-touch -- it's not an age thing. It's a user experience thing. People sometimes go into a bank knowing exactly what they want. More often, people don't really know what they want. i.e. they know they want a savings account, but they don't know if they want a 529 or a roth ira or just a money market checking account. You can think of bank branches like stack overflow: when someone asks "how can i do X" the answer is often often "do Y instead." Most people aren't taught financial literacy, and it varies over time and by geography. Also, most of the population isn't as comfortable with technology skills in general, which developers and professionals often overestimate. For commercial or investment banking (where banks make most of their profit) it's a whole 'nother story, but the author was trying to deal with consumer / small business stuff seems like.

healsjnr1 7y ago
But I think this is one of the points of the article: the human system are thoroughly broken and convoluted. I've recently switched between banks and done just what you said: I went in to a branch knowing roughly what I wanted, but unsure exactly how to setup it up. The end results was _months_ of back and forth. The agents in person or in call centres did not know answers to fairly simply questions (can I have an overdraft on an offset account) and were unable to answer questions about applications (my credit card application continually gave me notice online saying 'proof of other funds required', no one was able to tell me what this meant our what I had to provide). These problems are not related to the deep legacy issues of interbank transfers and settlement or fraud. They are failings in organisational design and management, information design, customer service design. I'd guess they are a symptom of continuous churn and restructuring, of flipping from in sourcing to outsourcing and back again. They are all problems that are within their power to resolve (yes, at great cost )
- eecc 7y ago
  Oh, you nailed it with “symptoms of continuous churn and restructuring”. Just yesterday I was chatting with my manager about the “legacies that never die” which dramatically multiply complexity and spread the teams even more thinly...

healsjnr1 7y ago

But I think this is one of the points of the article: the human system are thoroughly broken and convoluted. I've recently switched between banks and done just what you said: I went in to a branch knowing roughly what I wanted, but unsure exactly how to setup it up. The end results was _months_ of back and forth. The agents in person or in call centres did not know answers to fairly simply questions (can I have an overdraft on an offset account) and were unable to answer questions about applications (my credit card application continually gave me notice online saying 'proof of other funds required', no one was able to tell me what this meant our what I had to provide). These problems are not related to the deep legacy issues of interbank transfers and settlement or fraud. They are failings in organisational design and management, information design, customer service design. I'd guess they are a symptom of continuous churn and restructuring, of flipping from in sourcing to outsourcing and back again. They are all problems that are within their power to resolve (yes, at great cost )

eecc 7y ago
Oh, you nailed it with “symptoms of continuous churn and restructuring”. Just yesterday I was chatting with my manager about the “legacies that never die” which dramatically multiply complexity and spread the teams even more thinly...