Florence Adaimi

Mike Budden explores how delegated banking will create a brand new set of FC&C challenges. Most bank payment controls are built around a fairly simple sequence. A customer gives an instruction, the bank checks that the instruction is genuine and the money moves. Standing orders and direct debits automate the process, but the underlying instruction remains fixed and predictable. Delegated banking changes that.

Andrew Ducker asks what happens to delegated banking when the customer’s interests don’t match the bank’s. Delegated banking sounds relatively straightforward when a bank is helping someone save more, avoid an unnecessary charge or prepare for a higher mortgage payment. It becomes rather more complicated when that customer owes the bank money. Collections is where the promise of acting on a customer’s behalf faces its hardest test. The bank has a payment to recover.

Pam Quinn-Boland asks what might happen when a bank better understands a customer’s life, not simply their products. Sarah’s fixed-rate mortgage is coming to an end. Her bank knows the date. It knows her monthly payment and the balance of any savings she holds there. It can send her a reminder and a link to its latest fixed-rate deals. What it can’t necessarily see is that she has started helping her parents with their bills, or that one of her children will soon need support through university.