Up and down the country there are small but significant banks and building societies playing an important part in the day-to-day lives of customers and businesses. Yet they are not only helping customers locally, they are also changing the way we bank. The Cumberland Building Society will be familiar to Westmorland and Lonsdale’s Tim Farron MP, and despite a relatively small customer base compared to the traditional big banks, it is leading from the front when it comes to payments innovation and technology, offering more choice in the form of competitive payment services to their customers.
Late last month, the Cumberland Building Society was one of the first nine UK current account providers to offer Paym to their customers; a new secure mobile payments service that allows you to pay people directly into their account using just their mobile phone number – no need to share account numbers and sort codes. Paym not only makes it easier to pay back friends and family, but provides an additional payment option for sole traders or small businesses that have traditionally relied on cash and cheques.
The new service not only brings much valued wider competition and choice to consumers and businesses, but shows banks are taking the time to understand how customers think and what they need to improve their day-to-day banking and payments.
Innovation has helped improve choice and competition for customers in other areas too. For example the recent Current Account Switch Service, launched in September 2013, was introduced to not only speed up the switching process, but also to make changing a bank account a hassle-free and easy thing to do. The latest figures show that the switching volumes are up, but perhaps more importantly, people are increasingly aware, and confident that the switching process has improved and the barriers that have stopped customers switching in the past have been removed.
And this innovation revolution is set to expand further still, with Paym being available on more than nine out of ten current accounts by the end of 2014 as other challenger banks such as Metro head up the list of interested parties looking to join the likes of Barclays and the Cumberland Building Society in offering Paym. This is not only a good thing for customers paying back family, friends or small traders, but is good for competition in the banking sector more widely too.
This is what banking should be about; creating innovative payment services which cater for customers’ needs. Paym is yet another example of how innovation across the industry can create greater competition and choice within the banking sector which ultimately benefits customers; whether that’s you and me, or our local tradesman.
You can find more about Paym here.
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* Adrian Kamellard is the Chief Executive of the Payments Council
