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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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What has Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, or Citi done in the last 5-10 years for the retail banking customer? Sure, everyone has a solid mobile app now. But how has core services improved? Is there anything measurable new or improved with checking, savings, or loans? Transfers still do not work over weekends or holidays. I guess maybe the public doesn't really expect innovation from the banks, but then what's with the massive payrolls? What does their R&D do all day/year/decade?

Banks do lots of things and their largest R&D efforts aren't usually targeted that hard front end at retail customers. R&D projects in banks look more like creating a more direct path for newly originated home loans to be securitized because the different branches of the bank independently built siloed data sets on the originations side and the securitization side and they don't have an established pipeline besides treating each other as different companies. The direct retail customer has had some improvements as well, upgraded card security including the move to chip and then tap. I think cashing checks by picture came out this decade. Looking through my chase app it looks like you can buy stocks through the app and do instant direct transfers to other chase customers. So new stuff is definitely coming out.

I'd also say for banks more thought than you might think is put into determining where exactly to build new branches and roll out ATMs, which themselves have seen improvement.

For consumer-facing banking stuff:

Machine learning for detection of credit card fraud. Which is hard to notice, as you just don’t tend to think to yourself “oh huzzah I didn’t get my identity stolen today”. But the banks put a lot of effort into this, because they sure don’t want to be on the hook for a stolen card number.

I imagine there is a lot of money spent making transactions more secure. Customers might not see the effect.

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