MOROKU Latest News and Views From Our Engine Room
What all the fuss with making stuff fun??
Jobs on User Experience
There are certainly many classic Jobs quotes and interviews but this one on the tail wagging the dog is certainly up there Fabulous Le Guru “You have to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, not the other way around” Can you hold up the piece ...
Firms need business model change, not blockchain
Ben Robinson of Temenos has written a great piece on blockchain, the unbundling and subsequent rebundling of banks. Ben describes how in music, it was iTunes which unbundled music to let us buy individual songs. Spotify then rebundled the model to an all-you-can-listen streaming subscription service. This pattern when playd out ...
Banks and Credit Unions are Zeroing in on Gen Z
Banks and credit unions are increasing their spend on marketing tech, data-driven techniques and content marketing. According to the ABA “Martech” now comprises about 22% of the average bank’s budget. They are also targeting this spend at one particularly essential consumer population: Generation Z according to a recent analysis of the top 5 retail banking marketing ...
Playing the Game of Life
Almost 40% of workers in the United States are woefully unprepared for retirement, with less than $25,000 in total savings and investments. That’s not a huge surprise when you consider that 21% of workers with an employer-sponsored retirement plan are not contributing to their plan 44% are saving less than 10% of their income ...
Youth Banking Segment
Moroku is passionate about building long term value by helping kids learn the fundamentals of banking and including them in the financial system. Our beliefs create our reality and if we can influence these positively magic can happen. Fintech companies are targetting the Millennials market segment across the world and challenging ...
Fintech Bank
Banking The Underserved As Chore Scout is creating a new segment, so too is Fintech Bank: a de novo bank startup in the USA focussed on banking Money Service Businesses. These include pawn brokers, pay day lenders, cheque cashers, title loan shops and other non-traditional financial providers. It is estimated ...
Temenos Innovation Jam 2018
Temenos have 40 of the top 50 banks in the world running their software. After Moroku’s Chore Scout app was awarded 3rd best retail banking innovation in the world, by Temenos and their customers at their Innovation Jam in May last year, much has happened. After looking at 873 FinTech’s ...
Financial Literacy becomes a compliance lever
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted by the United States Congress in 1977 is intended to encourage depository institutions in the USA to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate. Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a ...
CUA School Fundraising Campaign Irks Local Families
With over $12 bn in total assets, CUA is Australia’s largest Credit Union. The CUA School Fun Run is a fund-raising campaign for schools in Australia that is operated by CUA. Children create online profiles and encourage their friends and family to support them in an activity, such as a ...
Building Viral Banking Platforms
Moroku wants all kids to build a healthy relationship with and beliefs around money. We want to do this because we have a sense that money is a major way that we measure success and whilst it doesn’t create happiness there is no doubt that it is involved in many ...
Moroku one of Australia’s top 10 up and coming tech companies
Techboard’s inaugural national annual celebration of Trending Australian Startups and Young Tech Companies, the Techboard 2017 awards will be taking place in Sydney on the evening 30 November 2017 at the Launch Party for StartCon, Australia’s largest Startup Conference Moroku has made it into the top 10 up and coming ...
The Great Savings Game
Funding Banking Retail banking is a simple game at its heart: Banks lend money to customers and make money on the margin derived from what it costs to get that money (Net Interest Income). On top of that they then look for cross sell opportunities such as cards and insurance. ...
AEVI and Moroku Partner to Mobilize Small Merchants
Going Beyond Payments at the Point of Sale: AEVI and Moroku Partner to Mobilize Small Merchants London, 07/06/17 – AEVI and Moroku today announced a partnership to distribute Moroku’s all-in-one small merchant POS software Marrakash on AEVI’s Global Marketplace; a B2B app store for smart Point of Sale (SmartPOS) devices. Marrakash is designed ...
Ethnography
Studying people, their cultures, sensitivities and behaviours is at the heart of how we think about our customers and theirs. Conducting qualitative research, the outcome of which is is an ethnography, helps us build hypotheses for testing and refinement, prototypes for validation and ultimately product that wins.
Fun
Treating financial services as a game is the most transformational opportunity available to financial services executives looking for an opportunity to out compete the market. When we put our customer’s success at the heart of the product design process we unveil fabulous opportunities to win.
Social
We have an ostensibly automatic social nature. We desire the company of others on a regular basis and if Maslov was correct, this need to belong and be loved is greater for many of us than self esteem or creativity. The pursuit of digital financial services requires us to remember this essence ...
Moroku Chore Scout scores Global 3rd
Moroku’s www.chorescout.com has won 3rd place in the Temenos 2017 Innovation Jam. There were 10 global finalists after the 5 regional heats with some strong competition. Each company was provided 7 minutes to pitch their story to the audience of over 1000 industry representatives from all over the world. Delighted with ...
Gamified Parenting Platform Delivers
This week the NSW state government of Australia launched a $20M innovation fund to tackle domestic violence. The Innovation Fund will provide a financial investment for initiatives in the following areas: Prevention Early intervention Improving the delivery of crisis services in response to domestic and family violence. In the ...
Moroku’s 2017 Mahavakya
The Mahavakyas are the great sentences of the ancient wisdom traditions in India and are contained in the Upanishads. Maha is Great, and Vakyas are sentences, or utterances for contemplation. They are simply the Big Ideas. Moroku’s Mahavakya is that after a life of work, people, particularly those in the developed world, should rightly expect to have ...
Digital Banking – How it’s making us poorer
Since the turn of the century banking has undergone a rapid digital transformation. No longer do people line up in branches to do their banking instead they use their smartphones and computers, where monitoring accounts and transferring money is never more than a few clicks away. With this level of ...
A fresh look at mobile money
Mobile Industry Group (MIG) – 15 August Meeting – Wallets, Payments & Commerce – A fresh look at mobile money Monday, 15 August 2016 from 3:30PM – 5:30PM A reminder our MIG meeting for August is on Monday. Our topic for the month is Wallets, Payments & Commerce – A fresh look at mobile money. ...
Do Not Fire and Forget
Global revenue from mobile games is expected to rise 21% to about $37 billion this year. That’s twice what retail banks will spend on digital. This growth has driven the China super hero Tencent to take a 84% stake in Supercell, the maker of the very popular Clash of Clans ...
Ancient temples, APIs and Dynasties
The cult of APIs originated at least as early as the 1st dynasty, around 2800 BC. Like other bull deities, APIs was probably at first a fertility god concerned with the propagation of grain and herds. Today and as predicted on the Moroku blog 2 years ago, there is a ...
Two Design Tips from Sequoia: The MVP is not always right and Uberise your Story
Sequoia are a well-known VC firm operating in the valley and as I was trawling through the website today for money raising nuggets I came across two ideas that really resonated. You can read them here or allow me to summarise The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept is a great ...
Money Ex Machina
ANZ took three years to get their mobile wallet from concept to market and as such was the last of the big four banks to give their customers digital cards. The bank started by trying to get customers to stick their lovely iPhones into an ugly piece of plastic and ...
Merchants globally to ignore Chip and PIN
Merchants globally will ignore Chip and PIN because the cost, flexibility and the user experience of software models based in the cloud and commodity infrastructure will be superior. This is going to happen despite all of the resistance by those that have spent billions of dollars on new fleets of ...
iOS Mobile App Engineers
We’re looking for iOS App software engineers to work with us in our Manly offices, building cloud services and mobile clients that access them. You’ll be involved in all aspects of product lifecycle from conception to delivery. For the right people there will be the opportunity to get engaged in ...
Android Engineer at the beach
We’re looking for Android software engineers to work with us in our Manly offices, building web applications and mobile clients that access them. You’ll be involved in all aspects of product lifecycle from conception to delivery. For the right people there will be the opportunity to get engaged in customer ...
What we all need to do is so important
Moroku help banks help their customers win. We do this by building digital experiences that motivate customers to save not spend and through this model build sustainable banking businesses based on liquidity as opposed to net interest income (NII) and fees. This is both really important and really hard. This ...
Predictions in Banking and Payments for 2016
It’s that time of year when people are asking me what’s going to happen this year. So with a pile of crystal balls here it is. 2016 will see the very blurry lines between online and offline, card present and not, put pressure on proprietary hardware based payment models as ...
Digital Banking and Payments – The quest to drive out cash
Growing up in New Zealand in the 80s I watched CDs replace vinyl, PCs replace mainframes and EFTPOS replace cash. That’s a long time ago aye bro?! I had been writing software for 7 years when I sold my post graduate thesis as a software program and headed off to ...
Social Media Blueprint for Banking and Insurance
Last week I was sat with an executive from a large financial services company who said that they were taking a conservative, risk averse approach to social media due to the adverse impact of getting it wrong. They were particularly concerned about reputational risk and brand damage. The issue at ...
The Rise of the Social Economic Enterprise
A couple of months ago a friend of mine, Ben Pecotich, said he was starting a business targeted at helping Social Enterprises. Pause Good – a new term. Curiosity lights up – “What’s a Social Enterprise Ben?” “It’s a business that doesn’t have shareholders and exists to support a more ...
Payments Today – Regulation and Non Market Forces
There are four drivers of non-bank participation in FinTech being: Banks Customers Regulation Innovation Regulation is a two edged sword for Fintech. The sharp edge for entrepreneurs are the high costs incurred by banks that non-banks may be able to avoid and therefore offer cheaper and better services, focussing instead ...
PayDay Lending – An opportunity for banks to compete on purpose
ASIC and the ABC are on the hunt for unscrupulous Pay Day lenders. Pay Day lending is the provision of small, short terms loans to people that require financial cover to pay day. Annual Percentage Rates (APR) can exceed 1000% as advertised by www.payday.uk “£230 borrowed for 28 days. Annual ...
Banking in the Crowd
Moroku stems from the Maori word for gathering, “puroku”, twisting it in the realisation that today the tribe connects via mobile. With only China and India having more social members than Facebook and the majority of our interactions now occurring on mobile, few will argue that the age of the ...
The Fabulous Truth About Money
Money. It seems to make the world go around or at the very least it goes around the world. It gets many of us out of bed every day in our search to acquire more of it. Somehow it allows us to do the things we want to do. In ...
Payments Today 102 – What Lies Ahead
Payments is undergoing a massive upheaval. Within 5 years the landscape is going to look very different to what it does now as digital currency, shifts in economic power, regulations, technology, particularly mobile and cloud, put everything we know into the mixer and serve it up in a very different ...
Payments Today
As Moroku grows it’s important that the team understands the domain we’re in. Banking and payments is a complex beast and it’s changing fast as technology and financial services collapse into one to create a new industry, FinTech. In order to assist the team get up to speed so we ...