XPLANE, which calls itself “the visual thinking company,” has produced this entertaining and (no surprise) highly visual video that describes the enormous changes that are taking place in the worlds of media, marketing and technology. The video has a strong U.S. focus, but is still worth viewing for its creative visualization of statistics and factoids.
Did [...]

Food and wine as collateral for bank loans – There’s no arguing that a good Barolo or proscuiuto is valuable. So, why not use it as collateral? That’s what some Italian bankers are proposing.

Agricultural lenders see opportunities in the local foods movement – Today’s boutique and specialty growers may be big business tomorrow.

Apple’s cool matrix-style [...]

In his Consumed column in the New York Times magazine, Rob Walker describes Plinky, a web site designed to prompt bloggers who are having trouble thinking of what to say. As he puts it:
“You have the technology. The only thing the technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything [...]

This article, by Vilasini Krishnan, was originally published in the June/July 2008 issue of Asian Banking & Finance.

Clicks are replacing bricks. The post dot com boom era is seeing a paradigm shift and financial transactions are no longer confined
to branch counters but have been extended to ATMs, computer screens and telephones.
In order to remain competitive, [...]

J.D. Power and Associates has released its 2009 Retail Banking Satisfaction Study, which measures satisfaction amongst consumer-bank customers in the U.S.
The verdict: customers are not happy. In fact, they’re 6% less satisfied with their banking experience than they were in 2007.
That alone is not terribly surprising. One, people love to hate easy targets, whether it’s [...]

Next time you consider using focus groups to determine what new services or products your customers want, consider first the case of Howard Moskowitz.
As best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell explains in his TED Talk below, Moskowitz revolutionized the U.S. food industry in the 1970s by studying consumers’ reactions to 45 different styles of spaghetti sauce. What [...]

New York, L.A., Honolulu, Chicago … St. Cloud, Minnesota?
We were as surprised as anyone to discover that ING Direct, the online bank with 7.5 million customers and $82 billion in assets, had one of their famous ING Direct Cafes here in Minnesota — not even in the state’s major metro area, but in university town [...]

Much has written about the marketing potential of social media (Twitter, Facebook, social networks, etc.) and the Web in general. That’s all great if you’re an online marketer. But what good does it do you if you’re marketing to customers offline or in the branch?
Even if you don’t market on the Web, you can use [...]

Well, it looks like the bankers in the WaMu commercials have prevailed. Chase is in the process of dismantling WaMu’s distinctive branches (including the groundbreaking Occasio branches) and converting them to standard Chase branches. There’s no word on the whereabouts of WaMu’s spokesman, Bill, but has anyone checked that unusual lump in the end zone [...]

Jeffry Pilcher at The Financial Brand has a brilliant post, “PR now completely overshadows ads in financial crisis,” which is highly recommended. It focuses on the need for big banks to avoid the temptation to advertise as they try to regain credibility in the eyes of the public. Instead, the post argues, banks should try [...]