Community

It is possible that some of the perhaps unusual behaviour that you quite rightly point out has its roots in the slightly odd and contrived manner in which TSB plc was conceived and then finally born.

In its whopping 332 pages, the public prospectus ( http://goo.gl/oJDS7x ) provides some revealing insights into the business model that perhaps start to explain the focus on web branch locators and maybe inhibitors to technology innovation.

The bank was born into an apparently bright new world where it could become a real challenger. But in TSB's case a world that also required it to hold, dare I say, 'old style' fixed distribution channel, comprising 631 branches, and a requirement to buy IT and Payments Related Services from Lloyds until the age of about 10 years old (no wonder they say online banking isn't changing).

Growth and innovation is pretty hard at the best of times but must be significantly harder when a major distribution channel is fixed (and worse, regarded by many as yesterday's channel) and technology differentiation is to a large extent based on and sub-contracted long term from a competitor.

The opportunity remains to properly engage with customers (and prospects) but the ability to do this digitally appears dependent to some greater or lesser extent on just how digital Lloyds wants to be. And you have to maintain that branch network of course... 

Unfortunately, even when you can enter more than 18 characters there is no certainty that the extended information will make it through the next phases of payment.  Even more frustrating when you are allowed to enter the information as though it will be transmitted, only for it to be lost before it reaches the receiver.

We are moving office and here is something from the past I was prompted to share.

Disaster Recovery in a shipping container...

http://t.co/iDxUU9SVBC