Finovate so far: the big themes in banking

Some of the best minds in business are gathered at the London Business Design Centre today to witness cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations at Finovate 2011. Chris Skinner kicked off the show by talking about what he sees as the top themes in innovation and the things he believes are having the biggest impact on banking.

First up was ubiquity; largely driven by mobile but more than that, Chris said, it's about 'chip enabled connectivity'.

Next up was customer experience and making sure the user experience is easy and convenient. I couldn't agree more! Once again mobile plays into this and there's been a lot of innovation around mobile banking of late. Bank of America launched its mobile bank app with amazingly quick uptake. What's more, Gartner has predicted that Apple's app store will go from 10billion to 180billion apps downloaded by the end of 2014.

Chris then went on to talk about two more big issues: security and data mining - data mining whereby customer behaviour is looked at in extreme granularity and the info gained then being used to enable a far better customer / bank relationship, and security needing little explanation as it consistently remains high on the list of priorities and customer concerns.

Chris has hit the nail on the head with these themes: 2011 will be the year when we see the mobile phone really changing banking as we know it. There is no doubt that the technologies and innovations are there, as demonstrated through today's demos at Finovate. The real challenge now lies in bringing solutions to market that are both convenient and secure. With so many innovative new m-commerce and m-payments services in the pipeline, now is the time for the telecoms and payments industries to work together and roll out equally innovative security technologies in order to ensure that they make the most out of technology innovation.