Mobile Financial Services
I had a good conversation this week with one of our senior IT managers about the financial services industry and the mobile web. I’ve been in financial services for a decade now, even working for the company who’s president (in)famously said “we’re a technology company that does mortgages”. Financial services and mortgage banking are fundamentally knowledge-based businesses, and IT is a critical factor to their success.
Our discussion though was around the mobile web and what financial services companies are doing in that space. For the most part, the answer is “nothing”, but there are some companies blazing a trail.
Mobile web for financial services is a lot like the regular web in the 90s. Companies are starting to create mobile-friendly versions of their legacy websites for the same reasons they created websites in the 90s: it is becoming an assumed price-of-entry for 21st century business. I doubt anyone is seeing a sales or customer satisfaction uptick from mobile-enabling their current web presence, but instead are doing it because everyone else is doing it.
The companies that are going to nail their mobile strategies are going to do so as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy which will include social media, mobile web and content marketing efforts. The perfect example of this is Quicken Loans, who are the technology leaders in this area for financial services.
While the B2C mobile strategies will be driven by marketing, the real value for financial service companies will be in the B2E space. I’m at a mid-sized company, and nearly every senior manager has an iPad. Most also have iPhones. The real value-add for a mobile strategy will be in maximizing the efficiency of these senior managers when they’re away from their desks through mobile-optimized reporting, dashboard and workflow applications. For example, every organization more than a few layers deep has approval processes for everything from purchases, to new hires, to contracts. Providing easy ways for managers to view and approve these via mobiles devices will be a huge timesaver.
The other growth area for mobile strategies in a financial services world is the sales forces. I had proposed doing a mobile web version of our site for our customers last summer, but after the business thought about it, they decided the biggest lift for the organization would be to provide mobile access to our backend systems for the sales force in the field. For example, an agent visiting a brokerage shop could get a lot of value around an application that provided location-based mapping of customers in an area, reporting around the volume and type or orders generated by that customer, and even be able to view the details on specific orders to answer questions while in the field.
Unfortunately, we never built the application due to other priorities, but this is definitely an area where a smart mobile strategy can add a lot of value.
One thing I see keeping companies from getting mobile efforts off the ground is a skillset gap. Financial services companies are heavily invested in Java and .NET, but the skill for building a good mobile presence are either web standards based (CSS3/HTML5/Javascript) or device-specific (Android, iOS/Objective-C). These are more specialized skills that are hard to justify staffing for, and are even harder to retain as the technology job market continues to heat up.
I expect to see a hot spot for boutique software consulting companies that specialize in mobile development which will sell their talents to financial service companies to build these presences. These companies will be able to combine the design and programming skills necessary to build the applications and mobile web sites that organizations cannot produce in house.
Usability (UX) is also a critical skill gap for financial services companies. Most internal development is built around a “good enough” mindset for user interface design. This is not scalable to the consumer-facing mobile world, where the quality of the user experience is a critical success factor for applications. And even the B2E users will have higher expectations for what they see on their smartphones over what they get on their desktops.
Finally, there is the whole “application vs mobile web” decision. Building a native application currently allows for the most seamless user experience, but it also introduces the same distribution hassle we saw with thick client applications. And there is also a data security question. Even in financial services, the world is turning to BYOD for mobile devices. Installing a company application on personal devices opens up the mobile device management can-of-worms, which is still the wild west.
Mobile web applications used to lag native applications in usability and performance, but thanks to Moore’s Law, and improved tooling, mobile web applications are more than up to the task for the majority of the applications being written, and will continue to improve rapidly. Just take a look at where state-of-the-art toolsets like Sencha Touch 2 are going, and the native advantage quickly disappears unless you’re writing 3D games.
I think mobile strategies for financial services companies are at the start of a growth curve that will climb quickly. While most B2C mobile presences will be more a “me too” strategy, there will be a few smart companies that maximize a comprehensive marketing strategy, hitting the right demographics, which will allow them to increase market share. This will be a rich area for disruption.
The real value in financial services for a good mobile strategy will be in productivity improvement in the B2E space. They just need to be prepared to pay someone else to write those applications, since they are probably severely lacking internally in the skillsets necessary to execute a successful strategy.
The Technical Resume
One of the “celebrities” I follow on Twitter is Guy Kawasaki. I read his book Rules For Revolutionaries many years ago and a lot of the concepts stuck with me. The book dates from the first dot-com boom, but is as applicable as ever.
A couple weeks ago, Guy posted a link to an infographic from RezScore showing how to create the perfect one page resume. I thought the concept was pretty cool, and my resume was sitting at around four pages, so I decided to put it on a diet.
After some effort, I managed to get it down to a single page, following the format from the infographic. I even fished it a bit on Dice to see what happened. In early December I fished my four-page resume on Dice for one day and had to turn off my phone and delete the resume to keep the phone from ringing. I had eight calls in a matter of hours.
So how did the one-pager do? Crickets. While the one-page resume is great, conceptually, it is not sufficient for a programmer. The one-pager will only work for two groups of people.
The first group is people without any experience, i.e. new college graduates or people with less than a couple years of experience. Their resumes shouldn’t be filling more than a page, and if it does, it is probably indicative of a job hopping problem.
The second group is people who don’t need resumes and can get work based on reputation alone. DHH, Paul Irish and James Gosling all probably have one-page resumes, if that. For them, a Moo MiniCard with a QR Code to their LinkedIn profile is more than enough.
For a technical person with years of experience, a one-page resume won’t cut it. After I compared my one-page resume to my four-page resume, it was obvious I needed to put the larger document on a diet. I ended up with a sharp two-page resume that adequately demonstrates the breadth and depth of my experience without writing a novel or leaving a recruiter guessing.
I validated my newfound ideas on resume length against the technical recruiter at my company. Her response was interesting: she said it didn’t matter, since everything was driven by keyword searches via enterprise “suckware” like Taleo. But her resume was a two-pager.
So my recommendation for a seasoned software professional is to try for a two-page resume, with three pages being the most. But the resume has to solve two objectives. You need to ensure it has all the right keywords to get you past the first automated filter, but it has to be concise and interesting enough that a hiring manager will want to read it. Two pages fits the bill.
Coding in to 2012
Instead of predictions, last year I made a wish list for Santa of things I wanted to have happen in 2011. Looking back at the list, I guess I must have been pretty naughty last year, because the stocking ended up pretty empty. Here was the list, and what I actually got:
- Google to kick Oracle’s ass over Android: this turned in to a total stalemate, although I could say Google “won” based on the number of Android activations and the butt-kicking Oracle’s stock is getting. I’m actually pretty ambivalent a year later over who wins. I don’t foresee ever buying a Android device, so the whole battle is orthogonal to my interests.
- Someone to finally build a good Windows notebook: nothing but a lump of coal for me. Lenovo is probably the closest, but none of the PC makers have hit on a Windows 7 equivalent of the Macbook Pro.
- ActiveState to push out ActiveRuby: another lump of coal. I’m not too disappointed though. I was expecting Ruby to go more mainstream, but instead it had all the thunder sucked out of it by NodeJS. Ruby is becoming the new Java, without the Java part.
- Google to buy Sencha (ExtJS): more coal. I’ve actually given up on someone buying Sencha. I’m suspecting they have bigger plans than a simple exit. Unfortunately, the market is getting a lot tougher and they may have missed their sweet spot. Sencha Touch is the best tool going in the mobile JavaScript widget space, but it is only a matter of time before JQuery Mobile, Dojo and KendoUI catch up.
- World Peace: a whole truckload of coal, along with a story that would take more than a few beers to cover.
In spite of a garage full of coal based on my visions of geek sugarplums for last year, I’ll brave speculating on a few things I would like to see happen this year.
- Grails will get hot: yes, I bashed the crap out of Grails earlier this year when I let my team give it a try on a project. But since then, Grails 2.0 has gone final, and excellent tooling support has arrived in the form of IntelliJ IDEA 11. I’ve been rocking the world doing some Grails work using Bootstrap and KendoUI, and I really appreciate Grails for providing a bit more structure than Rails without having to jump into the rigid world of Java/Spring. I’ll be doing all my personal projects in Grails this year.
- Kendo UI sneaks in: I originally wrote off Kendo UI as just an attempt by Telerik to clone ExtJS. It shares the same dual licensing model of ExtJS and plays in the same space. In reality, Kendo UI sits somewhere between JQuery UI and ExtJS. Kendo UI provides a good looking library which is easy to implement since it is based on JQuery. While ExtJS is much richer, it is also much harder to work with — there is no such thing as a casual ExtJS developer. Kendo UI also has excellent theming support, and I expect them to evolve it pretty rapidly throughout the year. Kendo UI is what JQuery UI should have been, and this will the framework to watch.
- NodeJS jumps the shark: NodeJS busted onto the scene this year and got a lot of people very excited about it. Like a new puppy, it was fast, light and a lot of fun to play with. But now that puppy is taking on weight and the peeing on the carpet is starting to get old. Things will only get worse now that NodeJS has sold their souls to Microsoft. I expect NodeJS to enjoy a record short 15 minutes of fame, at the expense of Ruby on Rails.
- Evil is the new Black: everyone should realize by now that every large technology company is evil. From Facebook and Google stealing your lives to pitch you advertising, to Apple and their walled garden, all these major companies are running with their own evil agendas and we’re just along for the ride. Even Twitter is jumping on the Evil bandwagon. 2012 will be the year you learn to get over it, and there will be good money to be made riding on Darth Vader’s cloak tails. Evil will be the new black.
The Spark
Amazon announced their new Kindles today, along with their much anticipated Android tablet, the Fire. I’m a big fan of the Kindle, and was looking forward to this, but in the end, the best I can say is meh. The new, smaller Kindle with the touch interface looks the most impressive, except for one “small” problem: the size.
My normal daily companion is a Graphite Kindle DX. It is the Ultimate Reading Machine. I love it for the large screen. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, so I appreciate still being able to get a lot of text on the screen even if I jack up the font size. The Kindle Touch is just too small.
The Kindle Fire is really just a media player; a distraction. It’s like the iPad, just smaller! They will probably sell a billion of them at that price, which is going to force Apple to innovate, so there is a plus side.
@Amazon, if you really want to get my pulse up, here’s what I want to see: a new device with the Kindle DX screen size, but with the improved e-ink display and faster processor. Ditch the keyboard too, and go for touch controls, but keep the page flip buttons so I don’t have to keep poking the screen to turn a page. The whole package should be smaller, thinner and lighter than my DX but with the same screen size. The rumors are you’re going to build one for next summer. How about Christmas? Pretty please?
In the Pocket
I was cleaning out my closet the other day and came across one of my old friends from a decade ago, a Palm IIIx PDA. I popped in a fresh set of batteries, turned it on, and was pleasantly surprised to see it still worked perfectly. The IIIx was the cutting edge when I picked it up in 1999.
As a basis of comparison, I put it next to my iPhone 3gs which I purchased two years ago. That puts these two devices a decade apart:
So what has a decade bought us? And did Moore’s Law carry over to the pocket space? In ten years, that would imply a 32x improvement.
| Feature | Palm IIIx | iPhone 3gs |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 16mhz | 600mhz |
| Memory | 4mb | 256mb |
| Storage | Memory | 32gb |
| Screen | 160×160 Grayscale | 320×480 16M color |
From both the CPU and memory standpoints, the iPhone surpassed Moore’s Law. Screen pixel density doesn’t come close to a 32x improvement, but a iPhone 4 with a Retina Display would be hit 16x, so not too shabby.
The only area that hasn’t kept up is the one I’m sure most smartphone users are painfully aware of: battery life. The Palm IIIx could go for weeks with a pair of AAA batteries. My iPhone needs charger love every other day. This is going to become an even bigger problem as devices get even more powerful. The typical smartphone is mostly battery already.
It’s pretty exciting to think where we’ll be in another 10 years. The PDA/Smartphone is really going to evolve into a “personal” computer. I bet we’ll see:
- 8 Core, 2ghz CPUs
- 32GB of RAM
- 1TB of Storage
- Built-in projectors that can display HD+ video in excellent quality over 1M
- Virtual keyboards projected by the device via laser onto the desk for typing
- Integration with an embedded sensor in the user for health monitoring
- Earphone patches you stick to the inside of the earlobe for audio
- Screen navigation through eye movement detection
Of course, the battery is only going to last 30 minutes, and your head will explode from the RF energy if you get it too close, but it will definitely be a sight to behold.