Nu iPhone Killer?

Garmin, the maker of those nifty GPS devices we love to use when we travel to new places, has announced a new smart phone. I’m telling you, if this phone becomes available on Verizon, I’m throwing accidently dropping my LG Voyager into the Atlantic Ocean. A few pictures of the Nuviphone are below. Thanks to Electronista for the pics.

Not Doing Your Homework Can Hurt

I was watching a rerun of HGTV’s My First Place the other day. In this particular episode, a young lady in Atlanta was buying a town home. She was a first time home buyer and had recruited her mom and a family friend, a realtor, to help with her search.

After viewing several homes, she settled on a new construction home. I sat in amazement as the builder’s agent went over the pricing for the home. If she used the builder’s lender, she would receive $10,000 in incentives, a 42 inch plasma TV for $50, and the earnest amount was $50. Interesting enough, the young lady said this sounded too good to be true. I feel it was. When she sat down at the closing the details were laid out:

Loan Amount: $197,650
Interest Rate: 7%
Loan Length: 40 years

Now, this young lady paid her earnest money with a check from Bank of America. I couldn’t help but wonder if she got pre-qualified for a loan through them. Did she shop around for a better rate at all? Considering she was a first time home buyer, there were plenty of incentives that she could have gotten. In a lot of cases, she could have at least gotten her closing costs paid for.

I happened to refinance my home around the time this young lady bought her house. At the time, Bank of America would have be right at, if not below 6% on a 30 year fixed rate. I did some calculations to see what the difference would have been had she gone with her bank at the time. Here is the comparison:

	Builder’s Lender	Bank of America
Loan Amount	$197,650	$207,650
Interest Rate	7%	6%
Loan Term	40 Years	30 Years
PMI	$1,228.22	$1,244.97
Interest Paid	$391,914.28	$240,538.00

As you can see, her payment may have been almost $20 more, but she would have saved over $151,000 in interest. Also, this is if she didn’t get her closing costs paid at Bank of America. Plus, the loan would be paid off 10 years earlier. If she received $10,000 to help her costs from Bank of America, her PMI would be lower than the builder’s lender. Just doing a search on Google for how to buy a home could have saved her sooooooo much money.

Diversity And Youth

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend the Dr. King Business and Professional Breakfast. As usual, this was a wonderful event that was now in its 8^th year. Sallie Krawcheck, chairwoman and CEO of Citi Global Wealth Management was the keynote speaker.

In her address, Mrs. Krawcheck drew upon her experience as a female in the white male dominated industry of investment banking. She spoke of her own biases in dealing with other women in the workplace and what she was doing to make improvements. Also, Mrs. Krawcheck mentioned that statistically, the top performing companies with diverse upper management outperformed other top companies that had upper management with a “similar” makeup by a large margin. Being an analyst, she thought the numbers were wrong.

Upon further digging and reflection, she concluded that the numbers were correct. It only makes sense that companies that actually practice diversity be more profitable. Our customers are not made up of a homogenous market. The top decision makers should reflect this, if only to bring in different opinions and experiences.

After Mrs. Krawcheck’s, Jeffery Fielding, a senior from a local high school, gave a reflection on the event. This young man first thanked everyone for their presence, and then called out the local businesses for failing the youth of the community. He pointed out that there was no clear path from school to the work place. Business leaders are in the unique position of providing guidance to our youth, through such avenues as internships, job shadowing and other activities.

Mr. Fielding also noted that the criminal element of our community had no problem with recruiting youth. Surely our business leaders could do a better job. Their action, or lack thereof, would have repercussions in our community. Better that they work with the youth and tap into their talent and skills early than deal with bad outcomes later.

After the standing ovation this young man received, I was left wondering what we could do to both increase diversity and nurture our community youth. For diversity, I feel that this has to come from the corner office and trickle down through the organization. If upper management doesn’t believe it, the rank and file employees won’t either. Not embracing diversity could cause your diverse work force to feel frustrated and leave for a competitor that does appreciate them.

As for the youth, an internship program and job shadowing seem like good avenues to introduce banking. Had I been introduced to banking earlier, I may have joined the industry a lot sooner. This could also make recruiting a lot easier. I believe one reason for the higher turnover in the past few years is the new focus on sales. Bringing in talent earlier could help them learn to be better bankers first, then salespersons.

Regardless of what you do, I believe putting diversity into action is a vital key for success in the financial industry. The question is, what are you personally going to do to keep Dr. King’s dream alive?

 

 

Why The iPhone Doesn’t Matter For Mobile Banking

Lately, there has been plenty of news of banks providing iPhone optimized mobile banking. iPhone users can go to a bank site, such as Bank of America, and be re-directed to a site with a special iPhone display.

While this sounds good on the surface, if I owned an iPhone, I’d be ticked. The whole point of browsing the Internet on an iPhone is to have the same experience as sitting at a desktop or laptop. Why would an iPhone user want a watered down version of their mobile banking? That just defeats the purpose of using an iPhone.

I happen to have the new LG Voyager from Verizon and I use Bank of America. My mobile banking experience is completely different from an iPhone user. Voyager, Blackberry, Treo, etc. owners aren’t lucky enough to have a special, optimized site for their phone.

Also, Bank of America announced that they have 500,000 mobile banking users (2.5% of total online banking users). If the different phone types were broken down, which phone would be the most popular? My bet is on one of the Blackberry variants. The reason is their mobile users most likely have a PDA type phone that is paid for by their employer.

I don’t know about you, but I see way more Blackberries than iPhones. Here at our bank, everyone with a company phone and data plan has a Blackberry. Those that got a data plan on their own mostly have Verizon. I’ve heard one person talk about getting an iPhone. I also know of one manager (who also has a company issued Blackberry) that got an iTouch for Christmas. He just uses the wifi on it when possible.

I say all this to just emphasize that the iPhone shouldn’t really figure into your plans for mobile banking. The iPhone demographic is just a small slice of the pie. Most people aren’t going to spend $400 on a cell phone or even have a data plan.

Just take a look around your bank or credit union and see what type of phone your co-workers have. That should give you a close resemblance of the general market base. The iPhone will help usher in new and better cell phones. But as the browser experience on cell phones gets better, I doubt people will always want watered down versions of websites.

Got YouTube?

Over the last year or so, there has been a lot of articles about FIs embracing the new “Web 2.0″ phenomenon. Should you start blogging? Create a FaceBook widget? Open up access to LinkedIn and MySpace? Build a branch in Second Life?

I have a suggestion for you. Why not just dip your toe and post all of those expensive TV commercials onto YouTube? I know there has been discussion at our bank about putting our commercials there. Here is a free outlet that you can take advantage of. Also, if your commercial is popular, you could bring more exposure to your FI.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I went to YouTube and did a search on bank commercial and credit union commercial. What I found was, in the top 20 results, two credit unions and one ad agency had posted their commercials. E-Trade was the only “bank” in the results of that top 20. All the other commercials were posted by other users.

This is a very easy opportunity for everyone. Do you know of a better way to get your brand out there with material that you’ve already paid for? Besides, the content will stay out on YouTube indefinitely, unlike the typical commercial run.

Is Your Website Ready For The New Year?

Well, it’s 2008. Have you updated your website for the new year? Specifically, have you at least changed the copyright date at the bottom of your web pages?

Fortunately, my employer’s site has the ol’ Copyright 2008 already there. Some other banking and credit union sites that I came across still had 2007. I even found a few that had 2005. Lets not even talk about vendors’ websites.

A lot of websites were developed by outside web design firms, so you can’t completely fault the financial institution with not updating the site. However, just so you know, all it takes is one line of code to automatically update the year in the footer on every page.

Actually, not even a whole line. Just a script function call that gets the current year and displays it. Not very complicated at all….