Brett King & Movenbank gain momentum

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Brett King & Movenbank gain momentum

Brett King knows a thing or two about banking - most of which he’d like to change!

For the last few months Brett’s disruptive banking startup, Movenbank has been full steam ahead closing $2.4Million in seed capital with VCs and seeing increasing coverage in local and international press.

Movenbank will be launching internationally in 2013 with the support of a local U.S. bank.

As a further signal that Movenbank and their reputation based scoring system CRED are hitting the mainstream, King was recently interviewed in WIRED magazine:

"Credit scores are a lagging indicator -- they only look at what has happened in the past," he says. "They [credit agencies] don't use data to look into whether your behaviour is risky or not now."

Movenbank's goal is not just to use technology to personalise the banking experience, but to reinvent the traditional risk model. King spent more than 18 years working for traditional banks and was struck by the opacity of much of the credit assessment process. "Most banks reject around 50 per cent of credit applications. It's a pretty strange business when you reject half of your potential customers and don't even tell them why."

Read the full article on WIRED

Brett also weighs in on the new iPhone - specifically singling out the lack of an NFC chip (Near Field Communication, used in tap-to-pay terminals) as a signal to banks to lift their game. While it's in the banks' best interest to maintain a monopoly over payment methods, as they have with EFTPOS, the rollout of workable NFC terminals and the underlying technology is moving at a glacial pace. Brett points out that there are a rapidly increasing number of competitors for payment systems who could potentially sidestep both the banks' payment methods and the poor user experience:

"Why do I say a poor user experience?We live in a data rich world right now, where we can download books, music, even boarding passes to our phone. We can use our phone to track where our friends and family are, or communicate with them instantly. Our phones can keep track of our fitness levels, and spur us on to new goals of activity. We can use these same devices to find a restaurant, a bargain at a retailer, or just to find directions (that is if you aren’t using Apple Maps…)

Compared with this rich data platform, nuanced user experiences and the amazing capabilities of our smartphones, the humble plastic card is just plain dumb. It can’t tell us anything at all. Even when we use it at the POS, we can only find out if the transaction is approved or declined. When a transaction is declined, we’re none the wiser – we wouldn’t know if it were due to insufficient funds, whether the merchant has screwed up, or whether there is a hold on our card for some other reason. Payments just look dumb, old and out of date.

The driver for reinventing payments is not putting the card into the phone to get rid of the plastic in our wallet – it is about reinventing and leveraging a payment instance married with data. The trouble for the incumbents is that you just don’t need a card, a swipe or even a POS terminal when it gets down to it. A rapid transition to NFC would have saved the swipe-at-a-POS paradigm by allowing for a rich data support envelop around the payment.

With the poor industry adoption of next-gen POS payment tech, consumers and innovators are seeking that user experience without the swipe at all."Read the rest on Brett King's Banking 4 Tomorrow blog