Why won’t my bank let me play?

Thoughts by Aden Davies(from way back in 2011 I think)

www.adendavies.comwww.Twitter.com/aden_76

Hello my name is Aden. Today I would like to start with a question….

Which sold 1,000,000 fastest?

iPad v1Microsoft KinectWhich one of these futuristic devices sold 1,000,000 units in the shortest amount of time. Hands up who thinks the very clever controller free Microsfot Kinect device sold 1,000,000 quickest? And who thinks the tablet computer to end all tablet computers from the church of Apple sold 1,000,000 fastest?

Which sold 1,000,000 fastest?

iPad v1Microsoft Kinect

28 Days!

The iPad took a massive 28 days to sell 1 million units….

Which sold 1,000,000 fastest?

iPad v1Microsoft Kinect

28 Days!10 Days!

The Kinect managed this in just 10 days. Now this is not the fairest of comparisons as Kinect launched in a whole host of countries where as the ipad launched in a handful. The Kinect cost around £130 where as the iPad started at £400. But still wow…Kinect made it into the Guiness book of records for the fastest selling electronic consumer good. iPad 2 has beaten it selling 1mill in 3days.

It is futuristic!

The Kinect is a very impressive piece of technology. It allows you to control your Xbox using your body not a 12 button controller. It recognises individual faces and the number of people in the room. It maps your body in 3D. It can track over 20 joint movements.

It brings together a number of previously available technologies at a previously unthinkable price. But while its technical capabilities are amazing the things people have been doing with it instead of controlling their xbox is even more amazing.

The Kinect was release on the 4th of November 2010. Upon release a bounty of $3,000 was put up by some open source advocates for the first person to produce a working set of open source drivers for he device. It took just 10 days for the bounty to be claimed.

Not just for Xbox…

unofficially

Once the drivers were available it meant that the device was no longer just for the Xbox. People could plug them into PCs and Macs and start using them for a lot of interesting things.

Hack video 1http://youtu.be/7QrnwoO1-8A

This was the first video released showing what the Kinect was capable of when connected to a PC. I apologise for the quality but in a moment it will all become clear.

Hack video 2http://youtu.be/ho8KVOe_y08

That first video set off an avalanche of intrepid hackers and makers to see what they could build with this amazing device. There are now over 2 million kinect hack videos on YouTube. They are being bought by hackers and by universities in almost as bi a numbers as they are by Xbox gamers

Was Steve Ballmer happy about all this innovation?

So was Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft happy about all this innovation? This outpouring of all this creativity and love for the product leading to thousands of extra sales? Er no…

Initial Response from MicrosoftNovember 20th 2010

“Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products. With Kinect, Microsoft built in

numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make

advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety

groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant”.

READ IN A MONOTONE CORPORATE VOICE. Boring corporate language, thinly veiled threats of the law getting involved and basically the kind of tripe peopleare used to from big companies.

Not CoolThis makes Fonzy unhappy. Now it seems that over the Xmas period rumours started to emerge that Microsoft where having a change of heart. Maybe Father Christmas did not bring Stevie Ballmer any presents.

They had a massive U-Turn as they started to realise that people were buying these things for other uses. They were using them and by design were marketing them to a completely different audience. The SDK (Service Development Kit) would make it easier to interact with the device to expand on what you could build.

Microsoft Announce an SDKFebruary 21st 2011

Cool

Microsoft did not plan for this…

…they could not have imagined…

...who would agree to build a hackable

product?Microsoft may have planned to use the technology at PCs in the future (maybe Windows 8) but they could not have for seen the explosion of innovation around the device. They would never have thought to release it with an SDK from day one. They struck it lucky. To date they have sold over 10 million devices . Which has beaten their estimates by a considerable distance.

• Old Bank photo?

• What if we did?What if a bank built a hackable product?

Would a bank ever release a product that people wanted to repurpose? (not for nefarious means but to make it better for them) and would they do it on purpose? Would we? We certainly should consider it.

Internet Banking, that we all know and love displaying a list of transactions like it’s 1997

Let us take a look at an Internet Banking platform. A system that looks longer in the tooth than a sabretooth tiger wearing comedy stick on fangs. It shows transactions on the screen like the printout from an old dot matrix statement machine. I can do next to sod all with this data.

Some customers want more

It seems customers are starting to want more. To be able to move their data and use it in places that offer vastly superior technology, design and functionality.

Some customers want more

Beautiful graphs showing their money in a seemingly alien way to how we show it to customers. Enabling mobile apps that do the same.

Some of these tools purport to be able to work with certain internet banking sites….but the way they work is by getting you to hand over your logon name and password details so they can go and logon for you and get the data by scraping. This is like giving the keys to your house over to Amazon so they can deliver you a parcel.

This is dangerous to us and dangerous to the customer and also leaves the 3rd party open to liability as well. This does not work for banks that have the joy that is 2FA. This is not the way logons and data is shared on the web today. We need to change this.

8,880 Followers on Twitter

Experience Designer & developer with a passion for crafting beautiful experiences

HSBC Business CustomerSay hello to Aral Balkan. A freelance designer based in Brighton He runs some fantastic iPhone design courses and he apparently ‘crafts beautiful experiences’ He has around 9,000 followers on Twitter i.e. more than all the people who work in the HSBC HQ in London. They are mainly web designers and the like…

Unhappy HSBC CustomerAs such he is a tad unhappy with quite a few things his bank do badly. And he regularly tells those 9,000 or so people.

So instead of sulking and letting this issue pass he went and did what developers these days can do. He built a fix to his problem. In 4 days. Could the bank have organised a meeting about this problem in 4 days? It is both amazing that he could do this and embarrassing that he had to do this.

‘You would think that one feature of a current account in this day and age,

whether premium or not, would be the ability to download previous statements

in a data format of some sort.’

He is right. And while you can download two months of data in a variety of formats it is a very manual and onerous process putting the onus on the user. This is not the way the web works.

Banks are putting barriers in the way

Aral wanted to upload his data into and accounting package to help him run his business. Banks are getting in the way of a customer running their business is this what they want to do?

Here is another unhappy banking customer who has some programming skills. His name is John and he is 25 years old and he has reverse engineered his banks internet banking to remove the entire UI…

UI removal videohttp://vimeo.com/5986056

Stripping it back to its purest form. His code on GitHub which is public source of code used by the great and good. I was intrigued by this so I and a colleague called him and he told us he wanted to build his own iPhone app and find a way to make payments to his friends.

Let’s shut this down!

This is the natural reaction to these ‘hacks’ because people see them as a risk. This is why Microsoft put out that initial statement when what they don’t understand is that this is a huge opportunity. These are engaged customers who rather than switch banks would like to fix their bank.

Let’s build the worlds best internet banking portal so no one will ever want to leave!

This is a noble goal and one banks should certainly aim for but as their Internet Banking platform probably has not fundamentally changed the way it displays money since 1997. What banks need to do is make it easier for customers to use the tools they want to use. Banks will not be able to second guess this and build the best internet banking portal ever.

Let’s ask customers what they want!Now of course banks should ask customers what they want. This feedback is vital but as well as asking them why not also try and do something different?

Customers are showing banks what they want but they only have primitive

tools to work withThey are trying to build with primitive hammers and no raw materials. It is like a surgeon working in boxing gloves. Or bank staff members having to use Microsoft Word and Lotus Notes.

Could we provide customers with better tools to see what they build?

Could banks not provide a more advanced set of tools? To help customers build what they want safely and securely while still allowing them some freedom to play?

What banks need are…

…APIs

What banks need are…

Application Programming Interfaces – a programmatically accessible point for data an services. A way to safely link data to other services. A way for our services to run on any channel what so ever be it web, mobile, tablet or internet fridge.

Application Programming Interface

Transaction API

Hello, I am Aden’s Mobile

App please send me his latest transactions

Hello, I am Aden’s PFM Service please send me his latest

transactions

Hello, I am Aden’s Playbook app please send

me his latest transactions

This very basic description covers how an API works. It is called by an service that needs the data. It confirms that I (or the service) is allowed to access my data then provides the latest data from the point of the last request. No manual messiness everything kept up to date and completely channel agnostic.

The Transactional API would return just a limited number of data fields.

Transaction Date/Time

Balance

Transaction Amount

Transaction Description

Just providing the absolute minimum of data needed for the service to run. If I want I could request a balance…make that process as slick as possible would be great as currently getting a balance via various channels can be a nightmare.

The Transactional API would return just a limited number of data fields.

Transaction Date/Time

Balance

Transaction Amount

Transaction Description

Just providing the absolute minimum of data needed for the service to run. If I want I could request a balance…make that process as slick as possible would be great as currently getting a balance via various channels is a nightmare.

What could customers build if they had access to those few fields simply and safely?

What could STAFF build if they had access to those few fields

simply and safely?

It is not just customers that have poor tools to work with. Bank staff and developers are also burdened.

What could STAFF build if they had a suite of APIs?

Branch API

Branch Appointments API

ATM API

Product Rate API

Individual Solution API

Service message API

Transaction Data API

Payment API

Imagine if staff had a suite of these services? Easily accessible functions that could be called and built upon by staff and customers alike. Think this is pie in the sky? Think banks will never have this due to security concerns?

Other financial institutions are already doing this. Mastercard and Visa are building these APIs now. Allowing their services to be embedded all over the web not just on their own sites. https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/Payments

And it is not just for payments or transaction data. The investment banking world is leading the way.

http://www.dbfx.com/

Obviously the leaders in this area are the new players in the financial space (I say new but Paypal are over a decade old now). They have built a whole host of services that allow complex payments to be built into mobile apps and to even let people build PayPal sign up processes into their own sites. Can you imagine that happening for banks? https://www.x.com/

PayPal leading the way

The PayPal APIs are becoming such an important part of the web that technical book companies such as O’Reilly media are now printing books on how to build using PayPal’s services.

PayPal APIs even have their

own book

Do you know this man?

The usage of API and open data access is changing the way the web works. It is being lead by pioneers inspired by the work of great minds like this man. Does anyone know who this man is? I will give you a clue you use his invention everyday. It has changed the world and continues to do so.

Do you know this man?

He invented the World Wide Web

He invented the World Wide Web and you did not know who he was? Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He is on a mission to revolutionise the thing he created. To push for open access to data and services to allow the web to become more than links to documents but to become a web of data.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

I can’t recommend his TED talks on the subject highly enough. If you work with the web you need to understand how it will evolve over the next few years. These talks show you how. It will effect people, businesses and even governments so the way entire countries run..

Tim was a key advisor on Data.Gov. A site which aims to publish all government data in a usable/programmable format. From flat datasets (CSV files) to government APIs. Getting data out of unusable PDFs. This is the way the government and local councils are going. http://data.gov.uk

★ Make your stuff available on the web (any format)

★★ Make it available as structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)

★★★ Non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of Excel)

★★★★ Use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff

★★★★★ Link your data to other people’s data to provide context

The 5 stars of linked data

Guidelines were produced to highlight how to publish the data and the qualities required for that published data as laid out in the 5 stars for linked data table. http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/06/04/the-5-stars-of-open-linked-data/ Banks should look at the data they have on their websites and see I any of it gets even a single star…

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/better-choices-better-deals.pdfThis data revolution is not going to stop there. This is the new Better Choices :Better deals document from the Government. Setting out a project otherwise known as MiData. One of the tenets of this proposal is ‘'A shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the information they hold about consumers, towards one in which individuals, acting alone or in groups, can use their data or feedback for their own or mutual benefit.‘

'A shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the

information they hold about consumers, towards one in which

individuals, acting alone or in groups, can use their data or feedback for

their own or mutual benefit.’

The web is constantly evolving. We are at a point in its evolution where access to data and services by all is becoming the norm. Banks can not hide from this change or try to rebel against it

But how will we show adverts?

Yes this change affects a few things. Banks will need new ways to display ads as they know them now.

But will it damage banks existing

business models?

Yes it will alter banks business models and practices. Would banks rather disrupt their own business models or have them disrupted for them by others? There are too many sacred things that bansk hold onto too tightly, this is the downfall of many companies.

But will we lose control?Yes banks will lose some control…so what? Some control can remain but freedom is increased and that will bring about some very interesting opportunities and developments.

Become a bank of the Web

Banks can no longer just have a corporate website/internet banking site that sit at a URL. Their services and data needs to spread wider. To become a layer upon which new things are built. Not just a bank on the web but a bank of the web,

NEW

Banks need to become hackable, mashable and remixable. Products that people want to play with. Allow their services and data to become part of the web. To be used by the web. Not just by themselves. By customers, staff and even competitors. Because if your bank don’t then another bank just might beat you to it…and become the bank of the web. No one wants to be a fast follower do they?