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waspit is a social banking platform targeting college students that offers social banking experiences with payments, offers, loyalty, and reviews.

The “Social Lending and Savings” section of Digital Bank notes the trend of Social Finance.

Skinner covers the following:

• Zopa in the UK
• smava in Germany
• Ppdai in China
• Prosper and Lending Club in the United States
• RateSetter and Folk2Folk in the UK.

Examples of Social Saving include:

• iWish from ICICI Bank in India
• SmartyPig in the United States
• BBVA and the Compass app.

Digital Banking also covers Social Funding and Investing.

Crowdfunding of new business start-ups and include:

• United States: KickStarter, Indiegogo, crowdrise, razoo, MedStartr
• UK: Funding Circle, CrowdCube, Seedrs and ThinCats.

Crowdfunding platforms raised almost $ 1.5 billion worldwide in 2011, with a growth rate of 63 per cent CAGR.

Wonga is a UK company providing online payday loans (short-term, high-cost credit).  In the US there is Cash America and Advance America.

Social Trading examples include eToro, ZuluTrade, Tradency, and StockTwits.

Deloitte observes that P2P business lending in the UK rose by 211% between 2012 and 2013.   In 2014 P2P lending accounted for £250m in UK personal loans.

Financial Times reports that the UK’s peer-to-peer lending market has tripled in size in just three years, was worth £550m by mid-2013, and will be worth £1bn by 2016 if it continues to grow at its current speed.”

More on this in Industry Trend: Unbundling of banks – Lending Club.

Almost every time we brainstorm bank business models someone raises the idea of a digital vault, yet I have not seen that offered as a feature by any of the banks I use.  It makes sense that a bank would consider data security a core competency and choose to leverage it as one of its dual strategies.

Skinner spends a lot of time on banks as data managers in Digital Bank.  I agree, but I don’t see it yet, so let’s call it a potential trend.

According to Digital Banker the number of WiFi units shipped has quadrupled in the last five years (as of mid-2014).

This should also be considered a market trend as consumers are most certainly coming to expect WiFi.  I keep the mobile data turned off on one of my phones and I know many who do the same.  I get annoyed when a place of business does not provide WiFi.

I can not imagine working without WiFi but many bank branch employees must do just that.  How do they help customers without access to the bank Web site and Google?  Do they drag customers back to their desk?  If so, the site they need access to is probably blocked–An architect at a major bank in ASEAN complained that he couldn’t even access my blog!

Banks need WiFi in their branches for both their employees and their customers.

Banks need to be agile in the build/test/deploy of new apps.  Digital Bank describes banks that invested in iPhone and then customers switched to Samsung.  This will accelerate.  Indeed, consumer technology is an important part of the environment for Banks.  Pol Navarro believes “innovation is a need to adapt to an environment, which changes faster and faster.  If companies do not change at least as fast as their environment, they will not survive.” in his interview in part 2 of the book.

Banks need the capability to sustain a rapid deployment of new apps on diverse devices.  The devices will not all be phones or tablets.  No one knows which technologies will be important or for how long.

The most notable example of biometric authentication is the fingerprint scanner on the iPhone.  I love it and use it at least 20 times a day!

I was fascinated by the finger vein scanner at the IBM lab in Singapore.  You do not need to make contact with the device, which appeals to my germ phobia.  Unfortunately, I have never used one of these in production.

I learned about an iris recognition app for smartphones at Spain’s Bank Inter in the introduction to the Digital Bank interview with Pol Navarro of Banco Sabadell).

Banks are servicing customers on social media and this has a profound effect on the tone of customer comments on social media, according to Digital Bank.

In the book Skinner interviews Banco Sabvadell, a top-six bank in Spain who has serviced customers on social media since 2010 and see social media as “like a pub where people go to chat.”  They use it as an “integrated service channel” and a “video content viralization platform”, and as a way to have human conversations with customers.  It is a sales tool as well, with customer comments leading to sales, such as a positive comment by a taxi driver about a POS device in his cab.  Social media are leveraged by multiple organizations from the multichannel service team to the communications and marketing team.  Pol Navarro believes sees a tend in integrating Big Data and CRM to increase knowledge about customers and provide a more personalized experience.  Social media content is an important data source.

Pol Navarro of Banco Sabadell speaks about Klout and social reputations as an important trend in his interview in Digital Bank.

Deloitte observes that both sides of banks’ balance sheets are threatened by the security markets. Traditional bank borrowers are shifting to bonds, positions in commercial real estate (CRE), and peer-to-peer lending services.

Deloitte observes that aggregator sites that compare products across banks such as UK’s MoneySuperMarket.com are becoming very popular, reducing cross-sales from the privileged access banks have to customers, and reducing banks’ competitive advantage.

More on this in Industry Trend: The Bank Finds You.