Normally, when I get woken up in a ditch by a small child poking me with a stick to find out if I am alive, the first things I check are Keys, Wallet and Phone.
I check this triumvirate several times a day; when leaving the house in the morning, getting out of a taxi, or even exiting a meeting. I need them with me. If I slip up and leave the house without one of them, I feel ‘naked’. I am not alone in this. Whilst the keys and wallet are quite a normal thing and were probably being checked in the Iron Ages or before, the phone and its impact on our lives has only happened in the last 15 – 20 years. The work I have been doing with Mike on the iPhone project has really changed my perspective on phones. It has opened my eyes to the sometimes awful possibilities that await us down the line…
One of the most obvious areas that the phone has created is the idea of ‘convergence’. The saying ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ doesn’t seem to have been translated into Japanese or Korean as more and more of our lives are crammed onto gadgets whose miniaturisation is only limited by the distance between our ear and mouth. Our phones now contain our diary, our little black book of numbers, emails, texts, a stills camera, a video camera, a sat nav, a cuddly toy….the list goes on. The only other area of unnatural convergence I could think of is the man that can cut keys and re-sole your shoes. Who is demanding all this convergence? Does anyone think it is a good idea? Where will it end? It looks to me like a bunch of boffins sitting around challenging each other to make things fit, irrespective of whether there is any customer demand. “Hey Bob” (or the Japanese equivalent) “I bet you can’t get a radio in it”… “I bet I can…”
In Japan, phones are replacing credit cards, with a chip built into the phone storing all the required information and being able to be swiped to pay for items like an Oyster Card . This chip can also be used to open doors by just touching the phone to the lock, and home door locks that allow this are a big seller in the home retail sector. The large car manufacturers are already trialling a system of entry, starting and stopping the engine just using your phone.
So with this technology, the wallet and keys can be left at home; everything will be stored on one little phone. Just imagine how life changing that will be when you accidentally drop it from your shirt pocket down the toilet when reaching for your trousers.
So coming back to my main point, and to bring in some relevance to this audience, where can the phone fit in to financial services? What applications or features would be of benefit? Could the Fact Find be completed on a phone by the customer and sent back to an adviser? Could it be dynamic and updated in real time as changes are made to financial circumstances? Could financial plans be sent to a customer’s phone with a text reply being acceptable as a digital acceptance? Could automated alerts be sent to the customer to keep them on plan? Could customer/adviser meetings be video or audio recorded with the resultant file being sent to the adviser’s CRM system? Could fees be paid by text message?
I am now of the age where I understand that, like the financial markets, if I drive with my foot to the floor without consideration for where I am going eventually I am going to crash. The phone market cannot continue to crank out new model after new model with little gains in gadgetry without considering the real needs of the users. Eventually it is going to crash.
Once you have designed a product that works as well as it can work, where do you go? In the case of the safety razor you give it 5 blades, one on the back and you make it vibrate (for some reason that escapes me). In the case of the phone, you add tons of superfluous applications.
People will eventually realise that they do not actually need a camera that can take pictures of the moon in detail when all they actually take photos of are their friends in the pub when they are drunk. They will work out that they hardly ever listen to the radio; use the sat nav (as the Tom Tom in the car does that); that most of the numbers on it are out of date that they use a paper diary for their appointments; and that they only want to deal with emails when they are sat at a computer. People will eventually realise that all they tend to do is use it to speak to each other because none of the other applications actually improve their lives.
Of course our iPhone application will be useful, and will improve lives… …how many lives we will have to wait and see.
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