[Dave Birch] At the round table on paleo-future, Tom Standage mentioned one of my favourite comments about innovation -- in fact, one of everyone's favourite comments about innovation -- which is William Gibson's comment on National Public Radio in 1999, paraphrased as "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed". What he means by this, I think, is that all of the technologies that will make a difference to a company's business model in any reasonable timescale (let's say the next 25 years) already exist. Therefore, the right way to try and get ahead of the curve on new business models is not to try and imagine amazing new technologies from scratch but to simply go out and look at how technologies are moving from the lab into the world and then try to consider their impact in a reasonably structured way.
The history of the technologies that we associate with payments today -- cards and ATMs being the key examples -- is that they came from outside the banking and payments world but were then picked up and exploited by banks. OK, fair enough and not a particularly radical observation. But does it matter? Well, look at the nature of the innovation underway at in prosaic processes.
[Quicken's] s new tool is just another example of how innovation in the online personal financial services sphere is being driven, not by banks, but by more imaginative outfits (often newcomers such as Mint and where Wesabe). The result: banks are steadily surrendering their franchise in personal finance as the population gets younger and more tech-oriented.
[From Banks failing in personal finance online proposition]
Perhaps whereas it didn't matter in the past, it will matter in the future because the new technologies will sit between banks and their customers, making banking services into a commodity accessed via networks and not a customer-facing proposition at all. As John Reed observed, "one day banking will be a line of code in a big network".
