I go to a lot of conferences and find that many have the same old slides saying the same old things. An example is the over-used illustration that it took 38 years for radio to gain 50 million listeners, whilst the iPad had 50 million consumers in just 18 months. Alternatively, another well-trodden statistic is that if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest country in the world.
So I was pleased to see some new figures in a conference I attended recently, saying that it took 13 years to get 2 million customers using internet banking but only two months to reach that number for mobile banking (Barclays); and it took 10 years to get 20 million contacts per month through internet banking and just 18 months for the same volume of contact via mobile (Société Générale).
That speaks volumes.
As did a number of discussions about social media in banking, particularly one from India's ICICI Bank, who showed that some banks have finally realised that Facebook is now a browser to the internet and internet banking, rather than some flaky social media service. The bank recently launched a Facebook banking app, and that’s the critical word: ‘app’.
Safe and social
As Sujit Ganguli, head of brand and corporate communications at ICICI, says: “Our customers were worried about going into their bank services from Facebook, but we made it clear to them that when you leave Facebook you are using our usual secure servers once you accept and install our Facebook app.”
In other words, Facebook apps are like mobile apps for banking: it’s just another app-based banking service.
I’m not sure many have got that point yet, but ICICI certainly has, as Mr Ganguli talks specifically about how the bank uses this approach to engage the customer by providing content, care, communication and creativity.
Launched in February 2012, ICICI achieved 1 million Facebook likes in just over 10 months, and now has almost 2.2 million after just 15 months (there are 65 million Facebook users in India).
A positive story
The ICICI Facebook page offers full-service banking as well as lots of other services of customer engagement. The most recent innovation from the bank is a service called iWish, a smart savings tool that works by setting savings goals which it shares with friends and family, who in turn can contribute towards the saver's objective.
The neatest and nicest part of the service is that, by using Facebook as a customer service tool, the impact of social media engagement with the bank's clientele has been impressive.
For example, before using Facebook for customer engagement, 24% of the online mentions of ICICI were negative and only 19% positive. Now, 49% are positive and just 6% negative. That’s a massive change and shows that a key part of the use of Facebook banking is for customer servicing, not just engagement. It also goes to show that many of the major innovations in banking are coming from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Asia and Africa, rather than the more traditional countries associated with cutting-edge banking.
All in all, as ICICI demonstrates, banking has turned rapidly from being something that distrusts social media to an industry that embraces it, or should do.
