| Hi there,
MOROKU’s newsletter – your trusted source of information around behavioural science and game-design in banking is here. We bring exciting news about growth of our business, an insightful article from our CEO, and a call to bold action!
We hope you enjoy! |
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| October is coming to an end, but what a month for us here at Moroku!As banks face up new competition and business model pressure, we’re seeing a significant increase in activity and demand across all our offerings: the GameSystem™ platform, our out-of-the-box apps built on top such as ChoreScout™ and EnterpriseEdition™, as well as for our design-led workshops.
To be able to continue to deliver the same superior experience to our customers at scale, we’re excited to announce that we have established an offshore development centre in Kathmandu, Nepal – via a partnership with Sydney-based Xtrastaff.
For more details on our progress with customers and with scaling our operations, read the full announcement below. |
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| We are also extremely proud to announce that our Board of Directors has been strengthened. MOROKU has appointed Jason Millett and Richard Wong as its newest Board of Directors members. Jason held numerous technology, leadership and consulting roles at ANZ, CBA, BoQ, Westpac; and Richard is currently head of Partner Engagement at Volt Bank. They both bring extensive actionable knowledge on how the large- and neo- banks are addressing the key transformations in retail banking. |
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| Similar exciting news, we want to share that Moroku is part of the Northern Beaches Innovation (NBI) Youth Pathways program, which was kicked off a few weeks back. NBI was born twelve-months ago, when a group of tech entrepreneurs, business leaders, innovators and VCs got together to discuss the progress of digital in the local community. Our CEO Colin Weir is among the founding members of this consortium.
As part of the program, twelve enthusiastic, creative and technical minds will work with Moroku engineers for the 8-week Engineering stream, to learn the architecture of the internet platforms and how to build a mobile app, with the ultimate objective being to pitch in a Shark Tank style event at the end of the year. If you know of any high school students on the Northern Beaches who would like to be considered for the next cohort get them to apply here.
The “Engineering” stream is one of five streams we’re building for the youth and their families in our local community to ensure we are ready for the digital future. The other streams are Design, Business, Digital Citizen and Mentoring. Stay tuned as we’re involved in building these out in 2020. |
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Re-shaping financial habits (part 2)
Last month we published an article about cognitive biases in money management, making the case that “putting people in control of their money” could actually have negative effects, if not managed properly.
We have now published a Part-2 article, arguing that the only viable option for banks that want to stay in the game is to go back their original purpose: helping people with money and enabling them to live enriched, satisfying material lives.
The great opportunity banks have is to design banking experiences that help customers build better financial habits: a) By putting customers in control of their money and then b) by helping them overcome their cognitive biases. More often than not, banks focus only on the first action, and leave the second one unaddressed.
The few banks that do address the fact that humans are flawed when it comes to efficient money management – and therefore must be nudged into the right behaviour – focus too much on complex, data-driven hyper-personalisation as a way to create accurate user-profiling at scale, but ignore the approach that’s guaranteed to offer faster and more efficient results: game-design.
In this article, we make the case that it is not hyper-personalisation, but rather game-design principles that will pave the way. Ultimately, a banking system of intelligence will combine both, but which one to go after initially? |
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| Sharing is caring. In this section, we share with you some of the best content we’ve enjoyed over the last few weeks here at Moroku. |
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The last pit-stop? Time for bold-moves
McKinsey Global Banking Annual Review 2019 is out! To quote:
“The fundamental banking business model is under pressure. Growth in volumes and top-line revenues is slowing, yield curves are flattening and investor confidence in banks is weakening”
Bankers, time for bold moves! What about re-thinking customer engagement around game-design principles? |
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Beyond personalisation
Dharmesh Mistry, digital banking expert and CDO of Temenos, writes an excellent article on the limits of hyper-personalisation in banking, arguing that what banks need to understand is how people behave with money, and simply amassing large volumes of data without applying behavioural economics will not lead to meaningul engagement.
Dharmesh argues that gaming as a blueprint for engagement solves this problem for banks, as it re-contextualizes the customers as players, having players motivations and this drives more meaningul engagements which leads to better user-profiling and higher loyalty.
The article was very well received even by Don Peppers, a renowned global authority on CX and marketing: “given humans’ aversion to long-term planning, it seems to me that one way for fintech to gain more trust would be to gamify the long-term view so people might pay more attention to it!” |
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A better bet in fintech
Interesting read from Quartz magazine, quoting Point 72 Ventures, the venture arm of the hedge fund founded by Steven Cohen. They believe that the next big thing in fintech is betting on modern technology vendors that enable incumbent banks to fend off the threat of neo-banks:
“traditional banks won’t be disrupted by the unicorns. However, they are going to have to learn new fintech-inspired tricks to fend off the challenge: older lenders need things like cloud-hosted software and systems that make it easier to sign up for a new account. For a majority of the new features or capabilities that neo-banks are talking about, you can almost inevitably point to another technology provider that is enabling incumbents to do something similar” |
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Mobile banking service Current raises $20m Series B, tops half a million users
Mobile banking service Current began as a B2C debit card for teenagers controlled by parents, focused on giving parents a more modern way to dole out allowances and reward their kids for chores. Over time, the product become more and more like an independent bank account for teenagers, topping 500,000 users, and taking head on the banking market, competing against incumbent organisations as well as against the likes of Chime, N26, Revolut, Monzo, Varo Money etc.
This is fascinating and it proves that there is a market in financial literacy for teenagers, but if we are to link this news with Point 72 Ventures’ opinion expressed above, then the bigger fintech play around teenagers and Gen Z is backing technology companies that enable traditional banks to compete better – since these institutions already have the brand, the parents, the scale, but what they lack is design-thinking and modern tech.
They’re right, the bigger bet in fintech is MOROKU.
Our solution ChoreScout™ is available as a white-label mobile banking application, pre-integrated with the largest core banking vendors on the market, and it has perfected the parents-to-children banking workflows with numerous financial institutions, from big-4 Australian mega banks to credit unions, to VC-backed challenger banks.
Bankers, time for bold moves! |
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Happy to help.
If empowering your customers financially is or could be a cornerstone of your digital value proposition, we’re just a small fire and a blanket away.
Team Moroku |
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