Chatbot success: Ethical interactions key to maintain trust
The value of AI is well established, but when a community bank implements a customer service chatbot, the usefulness may be less immediately clear. [Continue]
Artificial Intelligence: A net positive for banks
As banks push to increase efficiency and enhance customer experience, their use of innovative technology is crucial. Artificial intelligence is one form of innovative technology banks are adopting at a very high rate to achieve these objectives. [Continue]
Personal Microsites: The linchpin for educating customers
Microsites have been used by banks as a way of onboarding and cross-selling customers. Why not do the same for global developments like cryptocurrencies? [Continue]
Old cyber threats persist as new ones emerge
Denise Mainquist, founder and managing director of ITPAC Consulting, LLC. Based in Lincoln, Neb., Mainquist helps guide banks and other businesses through cyber risk assessments and defense strategies. [Continue]
Fintech proves what’s possible; will bankers adapt?
Technology plays an ever-increasing role in banking, particularly when it comes to innovation. For all the talk (and fear) about the power of online lenders, more than one speaker noted online lenders control only 5 percent of the lending market. Chris Rentner, founder/CEO of a digital lending platform called Akouba, turned that around, telling the audience at the American Bankers Association’s annual conference that traditional banks should be able to win the digital lending game because they already have 95 percent of the customers. [Continue]
Tech to assist in managing new accounting standards
The Financial Accounting Standards Board is replacing the current “incurred loss” accounting model with a “current expected credit loss” model, or CECL. The new and more complex model, slated for implementation beginning in 2020, will likely present a technological challenge for many banks. According to the American Bankers Association’s overview on the subject, this standard is “expected to have a huge impact on the costs to prepare and audit the allowance for loan and lease losses.” This standard is also expected to add expense to how investors analyze the ALLL and how banks manage their capital. [Continue]
Responding to demand, banks plan for greater tech use
For centuries, banking technology consisted of ink on paper. In this century, technology moves faster and most of us have trouble keeping up with it. Consider the smartphone. Since Apple introduced the iPhone a decade ago, the amount of time Americans spend using a mobile device to access the internet has gone from near zero to two-thirds of their digital minutes. It’s no surprise, then, that banks have been working on upgrading their technology. What was their focus in 2017, and what’s coming up in 2018? [Continue]
Cryptocurrency: Breaking through commercial barriers
A curious bit of news came across the banking wires recently. Burger King in Russia had launched its own currency: WhopperCoin. Built on the same blockchain technology as bitcoin, such homebrewed money is known generically as cryptocurrency. While bitcoin has remained something of a curiosity to bankers, personalized currencies, particularly in commercial enterprises, are already being developed and tested by the biggest players in the market. [Continue]
A community banker’s approach to cybersecurity
Every banker has heard more about cybersecurity in the last year than most of us care to hear in a lifetime. How much of what we hear is hype? And if it’s really that bad out there, how is a community banker supposed to keep up with it? [Continue]
Ideas from an online lender
If you want to know how to market to millennials, watch Social Finance, the online lender that calls itself SoFi. This is the company that started out refinancing student loans, but now also makes personal loans and mortgages. It just applied for a charter to operate an industrial bank in Utah, which would give it the opportunity to offer credit cards and FDIC-insured deposit accounts. [Continue]