Talk of banking channels is passé and misses the point. Going digital is about connecting everything, not carving it up.

I was at a conference last week when someone said, “I hate the phrase ‘omnichannel’”, and then proceeded to talk about the cloud, big data and more management gobbledygook, after rubbishing the phrase omnichannel.

Now I know we all hate buzzwords, but I really hate the use of the phrase omnichannel (I call this a phrase, as it is technically two words).

I hate it because it is just some made-up phrase that some technology marketing person dreamt up to talk about the challenge of all these digital touch-points. One step forward from multichannel (in the 1990s), omnichannel purely adds in mobile as a new touchpoint. For me, it just falls into a bin of 20th-century sayings that include video, tape, disk and more. We don’t have vinyl or floppies anymore, and anything with the word channel in it firmly belongs to that era.

Channel surfing

We started talking channels because we originally had one customer touch point: the branch. The branch was a physical space.

Then we added the ATM. The ATM is not a channel, although most banks refer to them as such because you can display a balance and a personalised advert for a mortgage or whatever.

Then call centres came about. We didn’t really talk about that as a channel either, but just as an alternative to branch access. It was only when the internet came around that we started talking about multichannel, because we were layering this new access to our old paper space.

Branches were designed for physical transactions with paper. Suddenly we were moving away from this tried-and-tested operation to remote transaction with data. This became difficult as we now had to think about consistency. We had to wonder about how the customer would feel if they did something online and then found the call centre or branch had no idea what they were talking about. So we started to provide more integration of channels, as we now referred to them.

Then the mobile and finally mobile internet hit, along with social networks and more.

Digital warfare

We are now bombarded with channels and, being stuck in our 20th-century speak, we coined the term omnichannel, purely to move away from multi-, which implied a few, to omni- which implies everywhere, non-stop, all the time in real-time.

Or does it?

I don’t think so. I think it’s just a neat way of saying oh look, we’ve got another technology to layer over our old branch network. We can’t refer to this as multichannel though as it is more difficult than just adding the internet. I know, we'll call it omnichannel.

Wrong.

It’s not a channel. There’s no such thing as a channel. There’s just a digitally enabled world that augments our physical being. We are digitising everything and, as we do, we need to think about how we connect humans to the net.

That’s the point.

As Matt Webb, CEO of cloud services firm BERG Cloud, says: “The web getting inside physical things is the 21st-century equivalent of electrification,” and I say: “Connecting humans to the web is the 21st-century business war.”

So for all you guys talking about channels, you are dead meat. You are stuck in the last century. Start talking about how to digitise everything, and stop talking about adding another channel to your old branch network, please.

Chris Skinner is an independent financial commentator and chairman of the London-based Financial Services Club.

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