Amazon Check

Amazon is talking with major banks about building a checking account-like product for its customers, according to a report from today’s Wall Street Journal.

The talks are allegedly focused on creating a product that would appeal to younger customers and those without bank accounts, but would apparently not involve Amazon itself becoming a bank.

Big picture strategery-wise, it imeans Amazon is continuing to work itself down to the very end of the consumer retail chain, near to the endpoint where people ingest and exhale their dinero. It would also have the derivative benefit of Amazon potentially cutting out another middleman (the bank), or at minimum minimizing the fees it pays. 

As the Journal article points out, Amazon would also get valuable data on customers’ income and spending habits across the board.

And as for the JPMorgans and other banks that may come aboard the Amazon checkbook-like safari, hey, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

IBM, Banks Collaborate to Advance an Open, Blockchain-based Trade Finance Platform

Bank of Montreal (BMO), CaixaBank, Commerzbank and Erste Group have joined an initiative launched by UBS and IBM in 2016 to build a new global trade platform based on blockchain technology.

This new platform, called Batavia, is built to be openly accessed by organizations of all sizes anywhere in the world, and can support trade finance for transactions across all modes of trade, whether goods are being transported by air, land or sea.

Batavia advances the work initiated by UBS and IBM to develop a trade finance platform built on the IBM Blockchain Platform powered by the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain framework.

The development work is being done collaboratively by the five banks and IBM in consultation with transportation industry experts as well as the banks’ customers to ensure that the platform is flexible and intuitive for customers and can be commercialized.

Batavia is targeting pilot transactions with customers on the network in early 2018 to test and refine the platform.

Designed to support more efficient, transparent and cost-effective transactions, the new global trade financing platform will help organizations more easily build multi-party, cross-border trading networks worldwide.

Batavia will allow transacting parties to view the progress of a shipment as it leaves the warehouse, is loaded onto a plane, truck or boat and arrives at the receiving port, automatically releasing payments incrementally along each step of the process.

The platform will help connect participants in a trading network, delivering the potential to transform global trade. The open nature of the platform, which encourages broad participation by many banks, vendors and regulators, will also help open new trade corridors, bring new players into the market and expedite processes that before were prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.

Traditionally, trading partners, including buyers, sellers, their banks, transporters, inspectors and regulators have relied on large volumes of paper-based documentation to securely conduct trade transactions. This process can take up to weeks, incurring costs, making data vulnerable to errors due to repeated manual reprocessing and tying up capital.

Delays and lack of transparency in trade can make it difficult for companies to access financing, limiting their ability to trade across borders and grow revenues. The Batavia platform will eliminate the necessity to handle and compare documents, allowing buyers, sellers and their banks to execute transactions with a high degree of efficiency and transparency.

Blockchain enables greater transparency by digitizing agreements entered into a permanent, immutable ledger that all involved parties in a trade transaction can view. The status of a contract until its fulfillment is updated automatically through IoT sensor data or user input.

Batavia will save users time and reduce costs by ensuring the integrity of data as it changes hands, reducing third-party verification processes and minimising the potential for errors, tampering or disputes. When all participants in a transaction can access a shared version of the truth, they can interact with greater trust, build larger and more distributed networks, and in turn, grow revenue.

You can learn more about the IBM Blockchain Platform here.

China Construction Bank (Asia) and IBM Developing Bancassurance Powered by Blockchain

China Construction Bank (Asia) Corporation Limited and IBM today announced the development of the first blockchain-enabled bancassurance project in Hong Kong. Built on the IBM Blockchain Platform, the solution is designed to streamline CCB (Asia)’s bancassurance process and greatly enhance customer experience and the quality of services delivered through faster transaction processing time and increased transparency.

Bancassurance is an arrangement whereby a bank and an insurance company form a distribution partnership in which the sales associates of the bank can sell the insurance company’s products to the bank’s client base and through the bank’s channels. The arrangement can be hindered by delays in data transmission or incomplete information.

By working with IBM, CCB (Asia) and all parties on the blockchain now have a shared view of required policy data in real-time, reducing the need for time-consuming status checks which can delay processing time.

This is accomplished through a shared, immutable ledger used for recording transactions. It helps establish accountability and transparency among network participants, enabling CCB (Asia) and its partner insurers to deliver the services more efficiently.

The solution is now under testing with insurance providers and their clients and is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year.

The IBM Blockchain Platform which underpins the project is the first enterprise-ready blockchain service based on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric version 1.0. Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies.

IBM Helps ING DIRECT Canada Connect with Mobile, Social Customers

ING DIRECT Canada’s mobile application, developed with IBM, delivers customers with a dashboard view based on their most frequent banking activities.

IBM is making a fast start with its new “Mobile First” initiative, which is intended to help companies around the world bring all their resources together to strengthen customer engagement, whenever and wherever the customer wants, and on the customer’s favorite device, which is increasingly a mobile one.

IBM client ING DIRECT Canada is applying a “smarter commerce” approach to consumer banking with IBM’s help in meeting the growing expectations of its 1.8 million customers.

IBM announced today that it is working with the online bank to deliver innovative financial services that improve ING DIRECT’s customer experience including simplified account access across mobile devices and social media channels, voice recognition, and advanced security.

ING DIRECT Canada’s mobile application, developed with IBM, delivers customers with a dashboard view based on their most frequent banking activities.

Based on IBM software and services, these innovations support ING DIRECT’s Orange Snapshot initiative, designed to provide its clients greater control to manage their accounts within their increasingly mobile and social lifestyle.

Orange Snapshot gives mobile consumers a complete and simplified view of all their accounts, as well as bill payment and email money transfers, in two easy clicks.

This allows consumers to sign on once from their mobile device, saving time and aggravation from multiple log-ins.

Working with IBM, the bank’s latest mobile innovation allows clients to easily and securely access their ING DIRECT account information from within Facebook’s social networking site.

Clients who opt-in to this app are able to view their account balances, history and pending transactions as well as receive account notifications — real time messages automatically pushed to them within Facebook.

With security and privacy always top of mind, ING DIRECT plans to expand this application further to include transactions such as transfers, bill payments and email money transfers.

Furthermore, ING DIRECT allows clients to share their experiences through Facebook and Twitter to make saving money more intriguing.

In a recent survey, ING DIRECT learned that 52 percent of consumers were able to forego non-essential purchases when they could better visualize the impact of their spending habits.

IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative is designed to help businesses better connect with the rising tide of digital consumers who prefer to buy through online, mobile and social channels.

It is estimated that there are more smartphones on the planet than humans. According to IDC, by 2016, more than 10 billion smartphones will be in use around the globe. In Canada, more than half of smartphone users bank from their devices — and that number grows higher when looking at users between the ages 18-34.

ING DIRECT continues to work with IBM in seeking new ways to connect to mobile applications in order to advance sales, manage secure transactions, and provide new insights about clients.

The bank has begun experimenting with new voice recognition capabilities on their mobile apps that will allow clients to conduct simple banking transactions by speaking rather than typing or the application can read account information to the customer.

ING DIRECT is also exploring the use of biometrics within their mobile apps for purposes such as client login to improve the client experience while maintaining the highest standards of security. Internal pilots are already yielding positive outcomes.

Recently, Forrester Research, Inc. recognized IBM as a leader in enterprise mobility services, according to the February 2013 report The Forrester Wave TM: Enterprise Mobility Services, Q1 2013.

Based on an analysis of 13 global leaders’ enterprise mobility capabilities and how they stack up, the report indicates that IBM “brings clients a world-class design agency combined with breadth and depth of enterprise mobility consulting both in terms of technology capabilities and global presence.”

You can go here to learn more about IBM’s “Mobile First” initiative.

Banking On IBM Industry Expertise

IBM has been relentlessly focused in recent weeks on the opportunity the smarter planet initiative presents to assist businesses in industry-specific contexts.

At Lotusphere in January, Lotus introduced its collaboration framework, which provided specific collaboration-oriented guidance across several industry-specific areas.

Last week in Las Vegas, IBM’s Mike Rhodin did the same for the integrated service management sector at IBM Pulse 2010.

Today, IBM announced that Whitney National Bank, with $12 billion in assets, has become a new banking customer and one that is utilizing IBM’s recently announced banking industry framework.

To compete in today’s dramatically altered financial playing field, banks must employ smarter banking strategies to achieve new levels of risk control, efficiency and customer service.

Whitney National Bank is using IBM technology across its regional banks to simplify its business practices, meet regulatory compliance and ensure transparency with customers.

Whitney can now extract key intelligence to obtain a full view of a customer’s transaction history — including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs — to deliver more customized services and offerings. Increased visibility to this account data also empowers the bank’s customers to regulate their activities and expenses.

With industry consolidation, the number one priority of banks is to be able to assess liquidity.

After acquiring more than a dozen regional banks, Whitney National Bank faced the challenge of consolidating customer information and a host of disparate IT systems for checking and savings account management, online bill payment and loan processing.

Whitney National Bank is using IBM Cognos software to extract key intelligence to help it obtain a full view of its customer bases' behavior, including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs, so it can deliver more customized services and offerings.

By integrating data from disparate IT systems, Whitney has been able to modernize its technology systems across regional branches to better manage risk and enhance customer service.

By using IBM’s Banking Industry Frameworks, Whitney National Bank is able to leverage pre-built industry-proven data and process models already employed by more than 250 financial institutions.

The bank is also migrating to IBM Power System with DB2 in its data centers in Allen, Texas and Prattville, Alabama.

Whitney National Bank is the latest example of how the right combination of hardware and software can be fine-tuned to meet the specific demands of banks.