Welcome back to The Club. Do you trust your bank? That's the question.
Do you trust them to not lose your money or maybe even give you the best deal.
We're talking with Anthony Thomson, who has created two banks in the UK
and now is creating another one called 86 400 in Australia.
We're also talking with Chris Skinner, the author of 14 books.
He's a global finance and banking expert. We're talking all about banks. Check it out.
Welcome guys to another episode of The Disruptors Club.
I'm here with Anthony Thompson, AT, the man himself and Chris Skinner.
Anthony is the chairman and co founder of an Australian neo bank 86 400
founded also, and former chairman of the UK challenger Atom bank and Metro bank.
Welcome AT to the Disruptors Club.
Chris, renowned financial author recently wrote Digital Bank and
another book Digital Humans so really, really digging into the digital finance.
Expert and global speaker on banking, finance and FinTech his website
The Financer.com check it out. Welcome to Disruptors' Club.
Anthony I'm going to start with you tell us about, you know, you keep making these banks
and things like that, like, Why Why do you keep making banks?
Okay, great question. Several parts to the answer to that. First is I'm a marketer by background.
And as a marketer, I believe passionately, that profit is a byproduct of doing
something good for the customer. You give the customer a better product or a better service
or a better experience and you manage your business well, you'll be profitable
and businesses need to make profit, the people who put up the risk capital
need to be rewarded, the people who work in the business, you need to
retain profits for investment, but that should be a byproduct of doing
something well for the customer. And I look at banking in the UK
which is where I started and here in Australia
And I think the big four banks have lost sight of the customer.
They think they're just in business to make money. And I think there's
a great opportunity, as we proved in the UK, I hope we can prove here to create
a new bank that puts the customer first, gives them a great experience
gives them great products, give them great service, and make some money as a result of that.
Now. Now
Now, now, let's talk about digital banking right now, obviously, like you said, AT,
it's been around in the UK for quite a while now.
And and
you know, I think there's a lot of innovation that's taking place, but I want to ask you
Chris, in terms of the market, in banking right now around the world, you know
how you seeing the market in terms of banking, and how are these neobanks
having an impact on those those new markets?
Yeah, I mean, the neoanks at the moment are in different flavours.
So there's some that are very specialised, and they're not really
providing full banking, they're just doing prepaid cards and payments and transactions.
There's others that are a niche like stripe that are just doing a specific activity.
And they're not banks at all. And then there's some that are forming
that are going to be full service banks and Anthony's launched you know Atom bank in UK
which is a full service digital bank, equally there's many others in UK and
what you tend to find in the markets, where we're seeing a lot of these neobanks
challenger banks being created is that they have great ideas and great vision.
But they don't have customers. They don't have history, therefore they don't have trust. And so the challenge is how do you get customers to switch to trust you,
when you haven't got any history and you haven't got any trust. It grows over time.
And what tends to happen is that a lot of these neobanks focus on becoming
your second choice bank. Because it sounds cool and trendy, I'll open an account
and see what it's like. And then over time, the more that that bank serves you
better than your traditional bank, the more likely you are to switch and
to actually start doing activities on in the neobank. But so far,
it's a challenge to actually get any breakthrough. The probably the biggest
breakthrough that I've seen in terms of new banks is something like Marcus.
But that's come from Goldman Sachs. And that's because they have, obviously,
a big investment bank history. But we are seeing some successes in UK challenger banks.
And I think we'll see some here in Australia.
I pick up on two points that Chris made that are really interesting. First is around trust.
Unlike Chris, I've only written one book. But part of that was looking at research into trust.
And it's a very vexing question. You have all of these consumer groups who say,
consumers don't trust the big four banks. And then the big four banks produce
this huge amount of research which says, customers do trust us. How can this be?
They can't both be right. Yeah, so actually, they are both right.
Because psychologists tell us there are two types of trust.
There's what's called cognitive trust, which is about competence and
associated trust, which is about intent.
So cognitive trust is, do I trust you, my bank, my big bank? That if I put my salary in,
it'll still be there the next day? Yes, I do.
Do I trust you my big bank that you make my mortgage payment
on the third Thursday of the month? Yes, I do. Do I trust you my big bank that
when I go to an ATM to draw out $200 my card will work? Broadly, yes, I do.
So consumers trust the big four banks to be competent.
Second kind of trust is called associated, which is about intent.
And put simply it is, do I trust you to have my best intentions at heart?
And the answer with the bank says, No, I've let you down.
So the new banks have a challenge. They've got to establish that they're
competent because nobody seen them.
They've got to establish that they have your best interest at heart.
But at least in that place, we start ahead of the existing banks
because everybody's convinced and I think the Royal Commission has proved this
that consumers don't believe that the banks put them first.
