An intimate relationship with your financial provider
The relationship with a bank and other providers may not be very emotional, but it is one of the most trusting and intimate you can have.
It’s easy to imagine our relationships with other people like concentric circles, like ripples on a pond. There are those close to us, our family and friends, and rippling out further you have acquaintances, colleagues, business relationships and so on. Where are our relationships with financial service providers in this diagram? Most people would likely place them at the outer edges—it’s not a close relationship, more one of convenience.
–Business relationships are very different from what we think of as “intimate relationships”. But think again. We trust financial institutions to keep money safe, and also potentially sensitive information.
We disagree. We think that the relationship with a bank and other providers may not be very emotional, but it is one of the most trusting and intimate you can have. We trust that a provider will keep our money safe, will offer payment services that will be available 24/7, and won’t share our data (and its secrets) with anyone unless we say so.
Any relationship this intimate needs trust—and that’s a problem for any provider that wants customers to take more action, and raise the average revenue from each. Johan Sörmling, our Head of Mobile Identity, has written in-depth on this topic for fintech publication Financial IT.