Javelin Strategy & Research Blog

The big news out of Apple on Wednesday is that it is stepping up its fight to see which corporation will ultimately win the battle over who controls the remote control to your family’s TV, music, video and other entertainment. That news overshadowed the addition of a front-facing camera on the iPod Touch, a feature that could presage a day when consumers talk to their bankers face to face, or at least pixel to pixel.

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First Data’s end-to-end credit card processing solution known as TransArmor is as of today available to all First Data clients. The system uses encryption and tokenization from RSA to work with the existing First Data processing system. By the end of 2010, First Data expects more than 100,000 of its merchants to be using TransAmor. Read the rest of this entry »

Intuit’s acquisition of Mint.com last year left a bit of a void because it seemed the runaway leader among personal finance web sites had been gobbled up and gone corporate, with no clear runner-up in the field. And Mint has continued to set the standard high for innovation, underscored by the fact that Intuit effectively pulled the plug Sunday and prodded users of Quicken Online to switch to Mint.

But one thing about this space is that it is like a primordial goo full of start-ups with a long-shot chance of evolving into something distinctive, useful and popular. That list has to include Bundle, a joint venture of Citigroup, Microsoft and Morningstar that went live in recent days and is poised to make fast strides in the free consumer space dominated by Mint.

To be sure, Mint founder Aaron Patzer can rightfully ask, Read the rest of this entry »

As I prepare to co-present with analyst Mark Schwanhausser on our research webinar this morning on the subject on new account onboarding, I’m mindful that bankers not make random selections when designing this vital process. Onboarding is the process by which financial institutions welcome new customers to their organization. Our years of research on onboarding has found that while many companies have impressive discipline in their program, few have equal rigor in the method by which they chose *what* they will be disciplined about!

We surveyed 5,000 consumers and several bankers, and determined the factors that predict to most successfully welcome new customers into the organization, which includes both demographic (who you are, such as age and income) as well as psychographic (why you do what you do, such as  your previous banking experience and how that shapes your current expectations). Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Fiserv announced the launch of its Revenue Expansion Program, designed to help banks identify ways to build revenue-generating alternatives in light of reductions to overdraft fee income as a result of Reg E. The program’s focus also supports positive assessment of opportunities as other regulations, such as the Durbin amendment, force banks to reevaluate their revenue models. I like the Fiserv approach for several reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s fairly easy to make recommendations sound more impressive: simply add words like ‘research’ to your presentation. Better yet, put words like ‘quality’ and ‘nationally-representative’ before the word ‘research’. In the rare event that someone asks you how large the sample is, just repeat after me “the data collection method represents millions of respondents”, and then use several large multisyllabic words to intimidate the questioner into changing the subject. I’ve seen it done countless times and can assure you that it works!

Obviously I’m being facetious here, and yet I’m dead-serious about the following sentence. Much of what passes for fact in the industries of financial services, payments and security/fraud is simply made up!

Individuals can become effective leaders by questioning the factual support for assertions, and no one should be intimidated into ceasing their probing when the response includes purported methods of statistical rigor.

Here are a few examples of key questions that research  provides current and reliable answers for:

• Is mobile banking producing profitability, and if so for whom and through what changes in consumer behavior? (a nationally-representative survey of 5,200 consumers says ‘yes’, Read the rest of this entry »