Matthias Kröner is CEO of Ficoba – one of the SOMESSO “Entrepreneurs to Watch”. In this post he explains - in plain English – what Ficoba offers and the general emergence & importance of community banking. Matthias will be presenting Ficoba at SOMESSO Zurich 2009 on November 3.
FIDOR COMMUNITY BANKING is the result of a) the current market crisis and b) of changing customer online behaviour patterns. In a consequence to both developments, we see a clear need for something, that we call “COMMUNITY BANKING”: a new “self-understanding” for banks AND necessarily a modified self-understanding for banking customers.
Let me show you, how that looks like and what the customer’s advantage is out of that:
Firstly, we are a regulated bank. That sounds boring. But: Talking and Dealing with costumers money needs a professional and supervised partner. Customers must know, that we are a sustainable partner, of which the BAFin controls management and shareholders.
COMMUNITY BANKING means, that our customers and users know each other – if they want and on a nickname basis. Our customers are invited to communicate. They can chat about the sense of insurance A or the quality adviser B. No matter, which bank, insurance or company. They can ask community-fellows about their financial challenges or place a “money-question” to hundreds of registered professional adviser. They can rank and rate all kind of products and advisers. They can compare their personal financial situation with people in a similar situation etc. etc.
Means: The bank’s community helps the users to organize their personal finance issues and to find out, what to do in order to improve their financial situation.
Discussions within that community will also be brought to the main social media platforms like XING, facebook, twitter, so that an even broader audience group can participate.
Communication is the one thing. FIDOR COMMUNITY BANKING incentivizes the users with real money. Why? Exchanging publicly on that platform means creating value by content to the bank and their users. That must be remunerated. Like it must be remunerated, if a user talks about our products with a friend. Let me give you an example: - posting an advisory to be rated: 50 cents; - answering a question of another user: 50 cents; - posting a product suggestion: 1 euro – in case of acceptance by bank and community: 1.000 Euros. - participating in the YouTube based video contest “What should a bank look like in the future?” up to 500 Euros.
A fully consequent version of COMMUNITY BANKING demands further steps: Users must have the choice to cover their financial needs with other community members. And, it must be possible to users, to create their own prices. If there is nobody in the community, willing to cooperate or transact with a user, we still have the bank to cover the financial need of that user. Means: Users can decide, whether they want to act “peer-to-peer” or with the bank. My guess is, that this will strongly depend on the size of transaction.
Well, there is a lot more to tell and discuss, but this, we will do in Zurich. Looking forward to meeting you there!
Matthias Kröner
CEO FIDOR BANK AG