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January 27, 2010

The Usability Conundrum: Why "Move Your Money" won't work

Well, why Move Your Money probably won't work beyond a core group of ultra-committed individuals.

I'm a good candidate for the Move Your Money campaign: I'm progressively-minded, I like supporting the little guys, and I live in a town with a good local savings bank. But will I transfer my money from Bank of America? Absolutely not.

There are two major issues for me, and if I'm right, they're major issues for everyone else:

Access to expansive, free ATM network
Online banking that doesn't suck

Say what you will about BOFA, no small bank can compete on both these points.

To be fair, the SUM Network is a good attempt at an independent ATM network, but the promise of ubiquitious no-fee ATMs still hasn't yet been fulfilled.

As for online banking, I don't understand why there hasn't yet been a SUM-style initiative to pool efforts into one great online banking tool. (Is there? A really good one? I want to know!) I briefly had an account with Brookline Bank, and its online banking was years behind ShawmutFleetBankBostonAmerica.

Online banking isn't rocket science. If hundreds of savings banks and credit unions chipped in for a kick-ass user experience team to design and implement the next generation of online banking, they'd have a fighting chance.

As loath as I am to reference Apple, Apple continues to prove that just having technology X isn't enough -- you need to craft the full experience to keep your customers delighted. Come on, tablet computing has been around for ages -- but a little spit-shine on the UI gets the tech world all hot and foamy.

3 comments

January 27, 2010
8:39 pm

All true, but more fundamentally it won't work because "big corporations are evil" is a simplistic notion and the idea that everything would be better done by small local businesses is an illusion.

marcstober

January 28, 2010
9:19 am

I think it's two sides of the same coin. Why can't small local banks do things better than big banks? I've pointed to two reasons. Further, a banker who lives and works in my town will doubtless be better aware of the needs of his customers and the wider community. A small bank would theoretically have less bureaucratic nonsense preventing a change in lending policies, making useful exceptions, etc. If every lender had a personal relationship with each mortgage holder, do you think we'd have seen a crisis of these proportions?

Jonathan Abbett

October 17, 2011
12:48 pm

I hope you are wrong, but I think you are probably right. You and I sound similar except I did make the move. I think one problem in this country is that we have to have everything updated and beautiful. If you haven't seen the documentary (or read the book) "Money Driven Medicine," I recommend it. It makes a pretty good argument that what makes our health care system broken is that we always have to have the newest and greatest technology that in the end doesn't make the patients any more well than the previous technologies. I think this is true for banks. If you use ATM's a lot, I totally get that argument. But I don't so a less flashy online experience is well worth the itty bitty statement I made to B of A. It's nice to know that my Credit Union has to answer to me instead of outside shareholders. The best sign I saw at Occupy L.A. said, "Live Simply so that we can Simply Live". For me that sums it up.

Trish Reda

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