Javelin Strategy & Research Blog

A client reached out the other day because he noticed that we’re in the process of unveiling a new title for my practice area. From here on, you’ll predominantly hear Javelin describe things from an “omnichannel” perspective rather than a “multichannel” perspective.

It’s not just a nuance to provide an excuse to print up new business cards, tweak our website, and update my LinkedIn profile. It’s a change that highlights why strategic channel thinking must evolve as the financial services industry knits together separate service channels in an era of “always-on” interactive finance.

In a multichannel framework, the focus is on how to build multiple channels into a business. That enables the customer to decide which channel makes the most sense for a given transaction. As an analogy, imagine that you were a customer trying to decide which door would be most convenient when visiting a store. Customers strolling down Main Street will want to come in the automatic front door. Others coming from the parking lot in the rear would prefer a door that saved them walking around to the front.

Many financial institutions have been taking this approach as they augmented branch banking with Read the rest of this entry »

In March 2012, Global Payments was forced to acknowledge that a breach had occurred, but the devil is in the details. Transparency is the last word that anyone would use to describe this massive breach, and for good reason. While MasterCard and Visa alerted issuers of the processor breach, asserting that it began in 2011 and involved the potential compromise of 10 million payment cards, official details of the event have been heavily obfuscated – it’s as though George Orwell had coached their PR firm.

As a result, there are a number of questions for which we don’t have a clear answer:

• How did it happen?

• What type of data was compromised?

• How many cards were involved?

• Who was responsible?

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Olivier Berthier raises some important questions in a blog on Finextra about how to address the “subpar” adoption rates for online personal finance management tools. But what struck me most was the question he didn’t ask. There’s a crucial word missing in this look at how personal finance management will evolve: mobile.

Don’t get me wrong. Javelin has been saying since 2009 that it is critical to integrate personal finance management into the heart of online banking, and to free it from the confines of the tab for dedicated do-it-yourself budgeters. We have added to this vision of PFM moving from an online tab to mobile ubiquity in 2010, 2011, December 2012, and most recently in February with 21st-Century PFM for a Mass Audience: How to Build Everyday Online and Mobile PFM.

Here’s a key takeaway from the most recent report: While slow-moving bankers and PFM players are musing over the color scheme for a spending pie chart, consumers already are looking to their smartphones to help them make smarter financial decisions while they bank, shop, pay, invest, and save. It is because of the smartphones and tablets that Read the rest of this entry »

Pageonce has succeeded in making a name for itself as a direct-to-consumer personal finance management app that has leapfrogged better-known Mint. Starting today, however, it is setting out to make a name for itself that consumers will recognize. It has rebranded itself as Check.

The news might seem rather sudden to the startup’s users, who began receiving e-mail alerts today with a heading of “Check (formerly Pageonce Updates).” But it apparently has been long in coming for executives at the Palo Alto startup who long ago grew frustrated with puzzled looks and myriad misspellings of the company name.

There will be some head-scratching about the new name of Check, which will inevitably trigger mental connections with Read the rest of this entry »

The healthcare industry stores massive amounts of PII, and it is incumbent upon them to protect that data from theft.  This has never been truer given Federal regulation (think HIPPA and HITECH) and the current fraud environment.  We know that criminals are becoming increasingly proficient in misusing data compromised in a breach to commit identity fraud.  According to Javelin research, approximately 1 in 9 data breach victims in 2010 were fraud victims – this correlation grew to 1 in 4 as of 2012!

A prime example of an organization that failed to be a good steward of privacy is the Utah Department of Health.  In March of 2012 Eastern European “hackers” compromised a test server that housed data for government health care participants.  Due to a contractor oversight, default security settings were all that stood between these jokers and 280K unencrypted Social Security numbers.

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I bought a new laptop the other day. I won’t bore you with the details of its specifications, but suffice to say, as a professional nerd, I get pretty excited about these things. In fact, I got so excited that I actually bought it as an impulse purchase (thanks Amazon for removing the ability for in-store procrastination). The time of this transaction was late the other evening. The time I got the actual goods – the following afternoon. What an incredible world we live in where the delivery of physical goods is closing the gap on the delivery of digital goods!

It wasn’t always this way – growing up in 1980’s England, the only way for me to experience the instant gratification of an impulse purchase was to visit a store and hand over cash. And digital content was physical too – it came on CDs. As for home delivery, there were a number of companies that provided weighty catalogs where you could peruse everything from Fame posters to Furbies and order them by mail or phone, with an expected gestation time between order and delivery of six to eight weeks.

I may be beginning to sound like the Monty Python skit about four Yorkshiremen, ”it wasn’t like that when I were a lad…” But, it wasn’t. We live in a world that is so digital and so connected that anything less than near instant delivery (and gratification) is disappointing. Which is why the case for real time payments is really hotting up.

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