IBS Journal February 2017
EDITOR’S NOTE DIGITAL DO’S AND DIGITAL DON’TS
THIS ISSUE OF IBS JOURNAL INCLUDES A MAJOR FOCUS ON DIGITAL BANKING. THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY, THEN, TO BRING UP AMAZON’S RECENTLY UNVEILED VISION OF THE FUTURE OF SHOPPING
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Senior Editor Scott Thompson
Scott.Thompson@
ibsintelligence.com
urrently being trialled by staff in Seattle, the idea of Amazon Go is that shoppers pick up groceries in-store, pay via a smartphone app and walk out without queuing or scanning their items.
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As the e-tailer explains in the FAQ about Amazon Go: “Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.”
Not only does this challenge established retailers, but the ramifications for employment are also obvious. The concept could result in many job losses. Marc Perrone, International President of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, commented: “Amazon is masking its blind greed as progress. This is not about improving customer experience: It is about destroying good jobs, with no regard to the families and communities impacted. This is not the America that hard-working families want and deserve.”
Really, however, it is just a logical development from the self-checkouts already in use in most supermarkets, or the
self-service kiosks you find at the likes of McDonald’s. The banking sector is heading the same way. A relaxation of the rules around securing banking licences has seen a flurry of digital-only challengers emerging, whilst FinTechs and tech giants like Google and Apple are also looking to grab a piece of the action.
2016 saw a number of incumbent banks step up their digital transformation initiatives and, in most cases, this resulted in huge job cuts and branch closures. More than 1,000 UK High Street bank branches have closed over the past two years, according to a new report from Which? That’s too much, too soon. Increasingly, high profile projects look like convenient excuses for Deutsche Bank, ING, Lloyds Banking Group et al to slash costs and drive up profits, whilst trotting out the party line, ‘what can you do? customers increasingly bank online and on their smartphones’. But you can’t cut your way to digital innovation.
Of course, banks must move with the digital times. But at the same time an agenda of sweeping job and branch cuts could be counter-productive to the aim of a successful business, particularly for those banks who were bailed out by taxpayers during the financial crisis and are now putting further pressure on the public purse by making jobs redundant on a regular basis.
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