What Are Next Big Innovations For Personal Banking? Yes, The Current Customer Experiences In General Are Pretty Bad.

What are the next disruptions for personal financial services? Are they ready for a full “reset” ? Can they develop new perspectives fast enough and overcome their dogmas? How do we inject out-of-the box thinking and make them work within-the-box? Or can we re-shape the box? The last 6 weeks, we’ve been focusing some of the most interesting paradigm shifting ideas of how to transform banking, insurance and healthcare. Back to personal banking, there are so many opportunities for innovation.

Here’s one interesting one. iPhone check deposit. The military bank and insurance provider USAA recently launched mobile check-deposit technology, which lets users deposit checks from anywhere using an iPhone. USAA customers take photos of both sides of a check with the phone and transmit the images to the bank, which then verifies and makes the deposit.

The bank has just one branch in San Antonio and, because of its military legacy, has customers in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is so cool because it integrates with existing checking habits. It is reported that USAA has deposit growth nearly triple the industry average over the past three years. Further, 17% of all its customers across investing, insurance and banking use USAA's mobile app, which also facilitates on-phone trading, filing claims for auto accidents, loan calculations and the usual access to account information.

The future of banking is mBanking. The phone will become your wallet (contactless payments), your branch (for deposit) and your credit card. Just don’t lose it. We’re prototyping a number of cool mobile wallet and developing scenarios how they would fit it into a social-media culture. And what it means for SMEs etc.

Nokia will be a big player and could use P2P payments as an entry-point to emerging markets -- and a new revenue stream. It's partnered with Redwood City, Calif.-based Obopay to launch Nokia Money, a service that lets users make financial transactions on their phones. With Nokia Money, which will start to roll out in 2010 in undisclosed markets, mobile users can send money to other mobile users, pay merchants and utility bills, or top up prepaid cellphone minutes. I think more will join. We will end up having Nokia Money, iPhone Dollars, Tata Rupees, Ericsson Krona. Then we will need another kind of currency exchange.