The Road Map to Building a Better Bank
Book: Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go But Something You Do Author: Brett King ISBN: 978-1-118-58963-2 Publisher: Wiley (2013)
Chapter 14 is the final real chapter of Bank 3.0, and Brett King doesn’t waste it on theory. He gives us a checklist. A straight-up “are you ready or are you in trouble” diagnostic for banks.
It reads a bit like a doctor handing you test results. Some questions are easy. Others make you uncomfortable. And a few basically confirm that you’ve been in denial.
The 15-Point Reality Check
King puts together 15 questions that every bank CEO and Head of Retail should be asking. They’re blunt. Here are the highlights:
Do you have branches with under $15 million in assets? Research at the time showed that 18% of US branches were losing around $200,000 a year each. King predicted half of US branches would close by 2020. That was aggressive, but branch counts did fall significantly.
Do you still require a signature card to open an account? King points out that almost no regulator actually requires this. Banks just kept doing it because they always had. Pure inertia. If you can’t open an account from a phone, you’re going to lose an entire generation of customers.
Do you still call it a “checking account”? This one is surprisingly sharp. The cheque was already dying. Calling your main product after an artifact that young people have never used is a branding problem. It signals that the bank is stuck in the past.
Do you have a Head of Social Media in an executive role? In 2013, a lot of banks treated social media like a side project for the intern. King argues it should be more important than the call center, ATMs, or branches. Facebook had already hit 955 million users. Instagram hit 100 million in months. Ignoring social media wasn’t cautious. It was negligent.
Does your Head of Branch Distribution outrank your Head of Internet? If yes, that’s a problem. Customers use digital channels roughly 250 times more per year than they visit a branch. So why is the person managing physical real estate more senior than the one running the channel where all the action happens?
Do you prevent staff from using Facebook and Twitter at work? King’s response to this one is perfect. He basically asks: are you going to install metal detectors to stop employees bringing smartphones too? Blocking social media at work doesn’t stop staff from using it. It just removes the one opportunity you had to guide how they use it for the brand.
Can you approve a personal loan for an existing salaried customer instantly, in real time? If not, you’re missing straight-through processing and automated credit scoring. Two things that should be basic infrastructure.
The other questions cover similar ground. Do you track which products sell through which channels? Do you measure online sentiment? Can customers pay bills from their phone? Is your CEO on Twitter?
Every “no” answer is a red flag. And most banks in 2013 would have answered “no” to most of these.
The Five-Point Road Map
After the reality check, King provides five areas that banks need to address:
1. Digital Competency Is Core
This isn’t “hire a digital team and stick them in the corner.” King means digital has to be the DNA of the bank. Not a supporting function. Not a channel. The thing around which everything else is built.
Customers already treated digital as their everyday banking experience. Predicting needs, pre-assessing risk, and fulfilling requests in real time shouldn’t be fancy features. They should be the minimum. The baseline.
For customers growing up with smartphones, the internet isn’t “new technology.” It’s just how things work. Sticking a paper form in front of them isn’t process. It’s friction.
2. Deleverage Your Branches
King doesn’t say close all branches tomorrow. He says start unwinding. Begin with the least profitable ones. Plan for a 30-50% reduction over the next decade. And rethink what the remaining branches are for.
Some branches should be flagship locations for the brand. Others might just be a bank officer with an iPad and a couple of chairs. The point is that branches become a support mechanism, not the main event.
The tricky part? Deleveraging from real estate takes three to four years per location. So if you wait until the crisis hits, you’re already too late. You have to start planning before you feel the urgency.
3. Banking Is About Context and Journeys
This picks up from Chapter 13. Stop blasting broadcast marketing at everyone. Start understanding individual customer journeys. When is someone in the market for a product? Where are they? What triggered the need?
The marketing team of the future isn’t running print campaigns. It’s a revenue generation platform built on customer intelligence, behavioral analytics, and permission-based messaging. When the bank reaches out, customers should feel like they’re receiving a service, not a sales pitch.
King paints a picture: you’re shopping for furniture and the bank offers you a line of credit right there. You’re booking travel and insurance is automatically offered at an agreed rate. You get a raise and the bank upgrades your credit card. All of this happening without you having to ask.
4. Customer Dialogue Informs Strategy
Banks historically made decisions based on shareholder needs, regulator requirements, and legacy systems. Customers were barely consulted.
Social media changed that. Customers gained the power to talk about their bank in real time, publicly, to millions of people. Bank of America learned this the hard way when it tried to introduce a debit card fee and the internet collectively lost it.
King argues that this isn’t a threat. It’s a tool. Crowdsource new ideas. Let customers help design products. Build advocacy by giving your happiest customers a platform to share their experiences. The banks that embraced social media (King mentions OCBC, DBS, First Data) found it incredibly useful for shaping strategy.
The ones that tried to suppress negative feedback? It backfired every time.
5. Agile IT Might Be in the Cloud
Building all of this capability in-house is expensive and hard. King suggests banks consider cloud partnerships, vendor collaboration, and even pooling resources with non-competing banks.
No single vendor can solve every need. The requirements are too complex. So banks should look for partners who deploy in the cloud, integrate well with others, and can adapt as things change.
Small banks and credit unions facing the same challenges might benefit from cooperating on shared platforms rather than each building everything from scratch.
The Final Plea
The chapter’s conclusion is basically King’s closing argument for the entire book. And it’s direct.
Customers aren’t going back to the old way of banking. They’re moving forward. If your bank isn’t moving with them, they’ll pass right by.
He lists the companies that were already eating the banking industry’s lunch: Movenbank, Simple, Dwolla, PayPal, Square. These companies were removing friction. Every form, every branch visit, every multi-day approval process was friction that these startups were designed to eliminate.
His final ask is simple: innovate and experiment. Technology moves so fast that if you wait three years to adopt a trend, you’re already five or six years behind because the next thing is already on its way.
And then, four words: “Thanks for listening.”
My Take
This chapter works because it’s practical. After 13 chapters of analysis and prediction, King finally says: “OK, here’s what you actually do about it.”
The 15-question checklist is still useful today as a diagnostic. Swap out a few dated references and it reads like something a consulting firm would charge six figures to produce.
His five-point road map was broadly correct. Digital did become core. Branches did shrink. Contextual marketing did replace broadcast. Customer dialogue did start shaping strategy. And cloud technology did become the backbone of modern banking infrastructure.
Where things got more complicated than King predicted: the transition took longer than expected in some areas and was faster in others. Branch closures accelerated during COVID in ways nobody saw coming. Cloud adoption hit regulatory speed bumps. And the customer dialogue that social media enabled also brought waves of misinformation and manipulation that nobody fully anticipated.
But as a roadmap written in 2013? This holds up better than most strategic plans written last year.