All posts by JP Nicols

About JP Nicols

JP Nicols is the co-founder of the Bank Innovators Council, and a consultant and advisor to financial and fintech firms. He is the CEO of Clientific.net and a partner at Bank Solutions Group. Connect on Google+

Bank Innovators Lab Day in London February 13 After FinovateEurope

Vendor Choice: Take control of your small business pos systems and get a free credit card machine placed at your retail storefront. See credit card services website for more details.

Bank Innovators Lab Day following FinovateEurope

We are pleased to announce our Bank Innovators Lab Day in London on February 13, immediately following  FinovateEurope, held at Level39,  Europe’s largest accelerator space for finance, retail and future cities technology companies. We are also pleased to announce that the Lab Day will be facilitated by Innotribe co-founder Mariela Atanassova.

Our  Lab Day will help bank innovators digest, discuss, and dive deeper into the themes and concepts from FinovateEurope, and beyond, and having the experience and knowledge of someone like Mariela in this amazing accelerator space will provide bank innovators with the insight, resources, and partners they need to innovate and implement new ideas.

Registration is now open, click here to reserve your spot!

Our research has shown that there are several degrees of separation between the problems faced by bankers and the prototypes that excite entrepreneurs. This is the gap our Bank Innovators Lab Day will seek to bridge, creating a process for an effective dialogue between the business and the technology experts to articulate, understand, and scope the industry problems and explore how technologies– including those presented at FinovateEurope, could be put to use to solve them.

“Contrary to popular belief in the FinTech world, everything cannot be solved by an app– that’s why I am thrilled to be facilitating the BIC Innovators Lab Day. This will be a real lab, where we will scope, design, prototype, test, validate, and start over again, to create better solutions.”

Mariela Atanassova, Co-Founder of Innotribe

FinovateEurope

We are also proud to partner with Finovate, and BIC members can receive a 20% discount off of their FinovateEurope registration fee by using the discount code BIC20, which will offset the registration fee for our Bank Innovators Lab Day.

Finovate is the leading demo-based conference series for new innovation from startups and established companies in the fields of banking and financial technology. Held each year in London, Silicon Valley, New York and Singapore, the event series offers an insight-packed glimpse of the future of money via a fast-paced, intimate, and unique format. For more information on the upcoming FinovateEurope event in London on February 11-12, 2014, or to view videos of previous demos, please visit www.finovate.com/europe2014

About Level39

Level39 is Europe’s largest accelerator space for finance, retail, and future cities technology companies. Occupying the entire 39th floor of the iconic One Canada Square building at Canary Wharf, Level39 was opened by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, in March 2013, and has quickly become an important part of London’s booming Tech City. At Level39, we put our high potential entrepreneurs in the same space as some of the world’s most influential technology buyers and investors, accelerating their traction and access to markets. Level39 also creates and & hosts accelerator programmes and curates a busy events calendar. It is Level39′s aim to fuse London’s finance and technology sectors, enhancing London’s position as the digital capital of Europe and helping the positive transformation of the finance sector. www.level39.co Twitter: @Level39CW

Read the entire press release here

BIC Expands Global Reach with New Partnerships

The conclusion of the transaction. Handshake.

The Bank Innovators Council is proud to kick off 2014 with some exciting new partnerships that  will help us support, promote, and facilitate innovation for our members worldwide.

First, we are excited to help launch NextBank USA. Following successful events in Sydney, Hong Kong, Italy, Bogota, Madrid, Beijing and Singapore, NextBank is finally coming to North America in 2014, and we are thrilled to be a founding partner. We believe that BIC members will find the content of NextBank unique and invaluable, and our partnership will provide another major event for our members to gather and work together to help them innovate inside their respective companies.

Secondly, we are also excited to formalize our ongoing partnership with BankersHub, the leading source of insights, opinions, information on best practices, and economic trends through their online web education and virtual events. BankersHub is also providing our “innovators interview zone” at various live events to help you hear exactly what is on the minds of bank innovators.

Finally, our new new BIC Innovation Café, powered by Innovation Agency, will support 24/7 ideation and communication by providing online tools that allow members to form public and private groups to share, rank, and discuss ideas. 

All of these tools will help ensure that our members can accomplish great things every day, throughout the year. “The Bank Innovators Council was the ideal group to embrace our solution,” commented Christoph Wertz, President and CEO of Innovation Agency for the Americas. “BIC is leading the way in assisting banks to generate and start implementing innovative ideas, which is exactly what our tool is designed to accomplish.”

BIC and Partners

Read the entire press release here.

Read about it in American Banker: Bank Innovators Council Forms Industry Partnerships

Join us for our Bank Innovators Lab in London on February 13, immediately following Finovate Europe.

Back to Boston

Back By Popular Demand

On October 23, bank innovators gathered in a beautiful new space graciously sponsored by Brown Brothers Harriman. Aite Group Senior Analyst Ron Shevlin kicked off with a provocative discussion “What Bank Innovators Should Be Worried About”. We then split off into smaller workgroups for some interactive sessions to work on ideas for ways we might implement some of the new concepts for specific customer segments.

Read more about it and see the video here.

Participants overwhelmingly voted to continue the conversation, so we will be back in Boston on December 3.

Join us on December 3!

Will Attend Button

Cannot Attend Button

BIC_Sponsor_button

Screen Shot 2013-11-19 at 4.11.25 PM

 

New participants are welcome, and will not be disadvantaged by not attending the first workshop.

Attendees will also get the first look at our new Innovation Cafe online innovation community, powered by Innovation Agency, and our partners at BankersHub will be there to help us record on video exactly what is on the minds of bank innovators.

Click here to join us on December 3.

Special Offer for BIC Members

Innovation Models in Digital Bank and Financial Services

$200 Discount to BIC Members for the marcus evans Boston conference

Following our December 3 Boston workshop, marcus evans will be hosting a conference on December 4& 5 entitled Innovation Models in Digital Banking and Financial Services. The conference will feature sessions by Bank Innovation Council members Phil Swisher, SVP and Head of Innovation at Brown Brothers Harriman (Building an Innovation Function at the United States’ Oldest Private Bank) and Deva Annamalai, VP, Marketing Technology and Data Insights Group at Zions Bank (Structuring a Data Insights Practice as the Cornerstone of the Organization’s Innovation Ecosystem). The Bank Innovators Council is an Event Partner for the conference, and BIC members get a $200 discount at registration.

 

BankersHub will also be recording portions of that event, and we also will be joining them there to interview bank innovators on camera in our exclusive “interview zone” in the conference press room. 

BIC Member Survey

What’s on the mind of bank innovators?

What business problems and opportunities are their highest priorities? What customer segments represent the biggest opportunities for new innovation?

These are some of the questions the Bank Innovators Council asked in its first member survey. The Bank Innovators Council (BIC) is a membership organization that helps support, promote and facilitate innovation within and amongst its member banks.

The findings

Respondents ranked “Channel Strategies (online, mobile, other)” as their highest business priority, with 83% ranking their interest in this topic as 8 or higher on a scale of 0-10. This was followed by “Customer Retention/Customer Engagement”, with 77% ranking it 8 or higher.

The third ranked priority was “Cross-Sell/Expanding Share of Wallet”, far surpassing “Customer Acquisition”. “This suggests that banks are more focused on improving the experience and relationships of their existing customers than fighting to gain new customers” says Will Trout, co-founder of the Bank Innovators Council, “We think the promise of improved data analytics may be influencing this somewhat”. (The scores shown below are the weighted average of all rankings)

 

Screenshot 2013-10-20 22.33.47

 

The priorities of BIC members are spread a little more evenly evenly when it comes to the business lines and customer segments where they plan to focus their efforts. The top priority was “Consumer Payments”, followed by “Affluent Consumers” and “Small Businesses”, with 68%, 67% and 63% of respondents ranking those as 8 or higher, respectively.

Screenshot 2013-10-20 22.32.38

Members were also asked where in the innovation process they felt the Council could add the most value, and the answers were heavily oriented towards the front end of the process. “Identifying New Opportunities”, “Generating New Ideas/Solutions” and “Market Intelligence/Opportunity Discovery” were the top three priorities in this section, at 81%, 79% and 71% ranking those as 8 or higher, respectively.

Screenshot 2013-10-20 22.31.28

“It’s great that our members see the value in generating new ideas, we love to work on ideation.” says BIC co-founder JP Nicols, “We are also prepared to help them test and implement those ideas”.

About the Bank Innovators Council

The Bank Innovators Council was launched in New York during Finovate Fall in September, and has quickly grown to nearly 300 members from 34 states and 29 countries on 6 continents. The council provides provide opportunities for members to pool their resources to develop and test new ideas outside of the day-to-day demands of their existing businesses, and in ways they could not do alone.

The Council held a free innovators workshop in Boston on October 23, and is returning there by popular demand on December 3 to continue the conversation. The Council is also planning a comprehensive full-day workshop in London on February 13, 2014 after Finovate Europe. “Our members love attending cutting edge events like Finovate, and they tell us that they would like some help them putting all of those great ideas into context and begin putting them into action.” said Nicols.

Click here to register for our Boston Innovators Workshop on December 3.

Launch Party a Success!

Last week during Finovate Fall 2013 we launched the Bank Innovators Council. More than 75 bank innovators, entrepreneurs, CEOs, bloggers and industry analysts joined us on a Manhattan rooftop to celebrate the launch of the first organization designed by bank innovators for bank innovators.

We are proud to be creating a platform to help bank innovators do together what they can’t do alone.

Join us at BankInnovatorsCouncil.org

Bank Innovators Council LinkedIn Group