Bankloch

The last 5 years dozens of so-called   neo- or challenger banks  (according to Exton Consulting 256 neobanks are in circulation today) have disrupted the banking landscape, by offering a fully digitized (cfr. "tech companies with a banking license"), very customer-centric, simple and fluent (e.g. possibility to become client and open an account in a few clicks) and low-cost product and service offering. While several of them are already valued at billions of euros (like Revolut, Monzo, Chime, N26, NuBank…​), very few of them are expected to be profitable in the coming years and even less are already profitable today (Accenture research shows that the average UK neobank loses $11 per user yearly). These challenger banks are typically confronted with increasing costs, while the margins generated per customer remain low (e.g. due to the offering of free products and services or above market-level saving account interest rates). While it’s obvious that disrupting the financial ma...

In the past I already wrote a few blogs on very common gaps (i.e. gaps with which almost every employee is confronted with on a regular basis) in the standard productivity tools (like Microsoft Office, Google Suite, OpenOffice or iWorks), such as gaps in the digital agenda ( https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-digital-agenda-cornerstone-of-your.html ) or gaps in the video conferencing tools ( https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/09/video-conferencing-vendors-get-us-out.html ). It continues to amaze me, how these   gaps   are so easily accepted, while they   cost millions of euros in productivity losses worldwide . With millions of users using spreadsheets, word processors, digital agendas, video conferencing tools…​ you would expect these tools to be nearly perfect. Unfortunately many of our day-to-day personal and professional tasks, supported by these productivity tools, are still organized inefficiently and can be improved considerably. With large multinationals h...

Due to the Covid crisis and the resulting increase of working from home (which will likely persist long after the crisis), the precious tradition (wide-spread in many companies) of   collecting money for a gift for a colleague   (typically for a wedding, child or pension) via a circulating envelope is now disappearing. In our modern digital age, this tradition seems a bit archaic, but it definitely helps to   enforce the bond between colleagues . With colleagues being one of the most important factors of employee happiness, this bonding is extremely important for employee motivation and as such for employee productivity and retention. Some teams have switched to alternatives like someone collecting the money on his personal bank account and taking care of the gift, but this is very time-consuming (e.g. correctly identifying all transactions on his account, especially if the collector is organizing multiple gifts in parallel) and impersonal (i.e. not possible to leave a pe...