Millennials, often termed the ‘me generation’, are some of banking’s most valuable and most demanding customers. Driven by service quality, personalization and price, they expect to be the focal point of their financial service provider’s attention, at all times. Meeting and exceeding their ever-growing demands is going to require ‘someone’ very special indeed.
Keeping Millennials for life is one of the most challenging prospects facing bankers today. The world’s banked Millennials lead busy lives packed with opportunities for their primary financial providers to support them. These run from mortgages to automobile loans to future investments. But Millennials often fail to make their primary bank their final choice of product or service provider, due to a range of delays and obstacles in accessing relevant information and securing timely loan decisions. And although they are receptive to more cost-effective styles of financial advice, such as robo- and online coaching, they typically go elsewhere as they become asset rich.
So how could banks, cost-effectively and comprehensively, create the aspirational ‘million markets of one’ that make Millennials feel prized and personally served at all times? Introducing MIMI.
Who (or what) is MIMI?
MIMI stands for Managed Integrated Money Information. She is a near-future vision of an advanced, Cloud-based AI-enabled ‘financial soulmate’.
In technology terms, MIMI is a powerful software programme able to absorb her owner’s financial context, expectations and aspirations very quickly. She then applies her inexhaustible 24/7 machine learning capabilities to optimise every financial touch point.
MIMI ranges from basic, routine transactions and optimised deals on loans and utilities, to the most complex asset and investment decisions. She never sleeps. She can seek, absorb and contextualise volumes of detailed, globally distributed financial information that would baffle an entire office building of quants. And she has just one single objective in her virtual life - to further the direct, personal interests of her owner.
Is MIMI just another fintech fantasy? Certainly not. Think of her as SIRI’s financial services cousin. All the technology required to make MIMI function is near productization today, or is already in existence. The global uptake of natural interface messaging shows this is the kind of technology interaction people want. And ongoing regulatory initiatives are shaping the fully open data environment MIMI needs for optimal functionality.
When it comes to the ‘me generation’, MIMI will deliver a standard and style of round-the-clock personal service that exceeds any current robo-advisor facility, or indeed anything available to even the most exclusive ultra-high-net-worth customers. She will do it at a fraction of the costs of face-to-face financial advice. She will build a close, lifelong virtual relationship with her owner based on constant service improvements, total personal relevance and unique levels of trust. And she will create multiple commercial opportunities for a whole ecosystem of retailers, vendors and service providers. The burning question now is will there even be a role in MIMI’s virtual existence for banks? That’s a question that demands careful thought and radical answers.
Read our paper 'MIMI and the ultimate future of robo-advice' to find out more.