Why Easy Banking May Beat Delighting Customers

Financial institutions should make it easy to do business with them their first priority. One community bank got account opening to 2 minutes and 13 seconds and increased conversion rates to almost 70%.

Derek Corcoran spent 25 years working on customer experience in financial services, including time as chief experience officer at Temenos. His new book, Designing for Need, argues that the industry copied its playbook from businesses selling things people enjoy. Banking is something people need to do, and the best version of a need-to-do experience gives the customer their time back. He makes the case with a community bank that opened accounts in 2 minutes and 13 seconds and a London branch where customers spent 55 minutes anyway.

Jim pushes back. He has spent years arguing that customers want us to know them, understand them and help improve their financial wellness, which sounds like the opposite of an institution designing itself to disappear. Derek's answer is the notice that arrives before an overdraft and the sweep from savings that quietly prevents it, an institution responding to what is happening in the customer's life in real time. They also talk about embedded banking, and why Derek treats AI as a tool that follows strategy.

Derek says banks under $10 billion held about 15% of industry assets and distributed 45% of PPP funds, and that friends of his who moved to a community bank were back at a national bank within a year. They get into intentional friction, with a customer who said a $600,000 mortgage should feel serious, the question of when you last opened an account at your own institution, and the marketing promise Bankwest and DBS make that Derek can't find an American institution making.

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