You Can Bank On It

FINTECH UPSTARTS DRIVE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. 

- Lauren Johnson

Change can be hard for the financial industry, which is dominated by decades of processes and internal systems. But with a slew of upstarts making their way into the trillion-dollar industry, the old guard is finding innovative ways to beat these challenger brands at their own game.

“A lot of these companies have what we call ‘technical debt’—very expensive mainframe systems that are very difficult to change, run [and are] expensive and obviously that limits their ability to innovate,” said Oliwia Berdak, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “The biggest challenge is often culture … In banks the attitude has always been to perfect [products] before it’s unleashed on customers and [technology] is a big change where you’re working with a certain degree of uncertainty and risk.”

Take, for example, TD Ameritrade’s new Twitter chatbot, which pulls up news articles, deposits money, finds a local branch and includes more than 160 short videos about investing. The tool was built by the brand’s 12-person emerging tech team that is focused on finding new platforms for TD Ameritrade’s offerings. In the past four months, the brokerage firm has rolled out chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Twitter and a voice-activated skill for Amazon’s Alexa. The turnaround time for Facebook Messenger was 60 days while the Twitter chatbot took 45 days.