Online bank Egg is considering a move away from pure Web interfaces for its customers, according to chief information officer Tom Llube, in a shift that will have implications for developers as well as customers.
If Egg, which made its name as a pure online bank with no physical branches, takes this route it would mean that those among its three million customers who wanted to make the most of the bank's features would have to run the Windows operating system.
"Today Egg is primarily Web-based," said Llube, addressing the Developing Software for the Future Microsoft Platform conference at London's QEII Conference Centre this week. "But going forward we will have to move it to smart-client-based solution."
This smart-client-based solution is likely to involve Longhorn, Microsoft's next operating system, said Llube, who provided a demonstration for the audience at the conference.
The move from the browser-based model to a smart-client model will be an important shift for Egg, said Llube. "Longhorn is a key bit of the jigsaw that enables me to take that step. Our view is that any company serious about this type of thing needs to look at smart-client, customer-side computing."
Later, in a Q&A session with journalists, Llube denied that the move would force all customers to move to Longhorn. Those using other operating systems such as Linux or Apple Mac OS would still be able to use the services through a Web client as all Egg customers currently do, said Llube, but those who wanted to videoconference live with the bank's support desk, for instance, would need to run Microsoft's upcoming operating system.
But, he said, the bank will move away from the current "one size fits all" model to having a range of services suited to different types of users. "So if I have a critical mass of users on Longhorn who expect a different class of experience we will cater for them, but we would support the others."
Llube also said the changing philosophy will affect the way developers will have to think. "My developers are going to have think much more about what it means to a customer, how it looks to them, than they do at the moment," he said. "I am becoming more discriminating about the type of developer I think I need if I'm to develop these types of application. It is because technology is so fundamental to us. It runs through everything we do."
Talkback
for me the web and thus a web based bank is not about platform it's about availability. make functionality platform dependant or exclusive and i might as well join the queue in my local branch of (pick your bank) any bank. why stay with egg? they will then offer me nothing further than i can already get offline. and i have some great tools online with my realtime bank not just my credit bank.
High value web clients can already be given priority access to web delivered applications without the requirement for application re-writes or operating systems migration. Egg should investigate the web Visitor Managment solutions from Catchfire Systems (see www.catchfiresystems.com).
Hmmm, this does cause a quandary.
As a Mac user I am not surprised, nor unaccustomed, to these kinds of announcements but more importantly does this herald the end of banking as we know it and the advent of ‘specialist adding value financial institutions’ - contradictory as that might sound!
Surely the next step will be for everyone to have their own server (most probably the size of their phone) in their basement/office/pocket that will handle all their day-to-day transactions, using web-based software to constantly trawl the web for the best rates for investments and mortgages.
So no more waiting on hold to talk to your bank, and only yourself to blame if you miss a payment or two.
With the ever-diminishing Product Lifecycle of technological products/services, how long after Egg launch this service before their core-market wakes-up, boots-up and moves on?
Ah well, as they say, every silver lining has a cloud!
Errr, isn't this just what the Java language and virtual OS were developed to avoid i.e. proprietory OS tie ins? I use a range of OS's and expect other users will join suit once smart phones and PDAs break the application barrier. Windows is a hopeless OS for this type of hardware, unlike Linux and Symbian. I don't expect any business to start telling its clients what they can and can't do on the basis of their hardware software preferences. The browser is a simple, extensible and flexible client in itself.
As an Egg customer I'd be likely to tell them where to stuff their "customer services" and "client facing services" if this starts to look like a reality.
What a load of rubbish!
Just as the rest of the world is starting to break free of Windows dominance and as the number of utility computers is on the increase (e.g. as set top boxes & gaming machines become more powerful and flexible), Egg want to tie users into Windows! I see a bank that will be limiting its customer base.
Most of the world is seeing the benefits of open standards & they want to go proprietry?
www.knightnet.org.uk
The web is failing to deliver an acceptable user-experience online; the forms-based browser application does a poor job of delivering an interactive and intuitive user-experience.
The benefits of the rich-client Internet apply in a poignant fashion to the financial service marketplace. Offering a "single page application" in which users can access and interrogate their financial data, perform powerful sorting, filtering, reporting and charting, all without suffering slow page refreshes, offers a value-add to users wishing to manage their finances online.
Financial product applications will typically span 9-10 pages, in which users are forced through a tunnel of forms, often with the inability to skip forward and backwards through the form. The form is validated in a punitive "red-pen" fashion, with little or no client-side intelligence. With research showing that 5% of prospects are lost for every page refresh in a product application, Rich Internet Applications offer an attractive return on investment.
Add to this, collaborative or "guided" form-filling, in which a customer service representative (with whom you can perform a real-time audio/visual/textual conference) can walk through a product application with you, all within your browser, all without any additional software installations, and you have a compelling and exciting user experience.
Not forgetting the immediate and enhanced cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, it's clear that Rich Internet banking offers a better user experience, and allows the business - the banks - to leverage their existing investment in online infrastructure.
While Egg are to be applauded for recognising the need for rich-banking, they have adopted a technology that will not be available until 2006 at the earliest, and that will only deliver this experience to those on the Longhorn platform - offering a backwards compatible but unacceptable web user experience to the other customers.
Working with the Rich Internet Application technologies delivered and under development by Macromedia, iteration::two are already delivering rich-client user experiences in a cross-platform manner, within existing browser technologies, on a platform with 98% ubiquity in the current marketplace. In 2003, when writing "Reality J2EE - Architecting for Flash MX", we discussed the development of the fictional "Bank of Edinburgh" using these rich-client technologies, and are currently taking these technologies forward in the financial service marketplace.
Rich-client banking isn't something that we need wait until 2006 to deliver; for those willing to embrace the Rich Internet Application promise today, there are companies out there capable of delivering it to your customers.
I saw the demo, and there was nothing apart from the service being "always on", that couldn't be achieved by thin client technology today.
The last thing that customers is wizzy gizmo's, have the banks not learnt from WAP ! Customers want a simple effective banking experience, something like what the Co-operative Bank and Lloyds TSB already do.
Innovation needs to happen from a business perspective not a technology one. Real new services, real new online products (i.e. with features that are best exploited by direct online access, not just offline products that are served through the phone and branch).
As for always on, it would be usful to see if customers really want this, would you leave you bank account open ona screen all day? This maybe relevant to "day traders" but Egg is a retail not a stock broker.
This to me is another case of R&D without real business drivers. The days of CTO/CIO's that do not understand "business drivers" are numbered.
Discussions about "rich" client, Microsoft dependency are irrelevant, what is relevant is whatever the technology the solutions delivers the online martini promise, Anytime, Anyplace, Anyplatform. Which translates to Real time banking, Online (internet enabled), platform agnostic.
Egg must not tie you down to a specific PC, platform (OS), else this will be a fad.
The other question begging is the cost of the video link to the call centre and requiring service agents to man them. Many trials have already been done with video links and there are many issues to manage, even at the basic level training staff not to scratch in front of the camera, it happens !
Finally, is the title of the article meant to allude to Egg being visionary? If so, they're about 5years late ! Forrester have been on this case for some time, it would be good to see their REVISED forecast on Rich Internet Apps adoption, as previously they have been VERY optimistic as have a number of technology companies that followed their advice.
In Summary......THINK BANKING NOT TECHNOLOGY