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Big Banks Will Vie For Your Attention With Cardless ATMs and VR
tedlistens writes In the year that bitcoin began to grow up and Apple Pay was born—and massive cyberattacks—the country's largest financial institutions want you to imagine themselves as incubators. Three of the big banks opened up innovation labs to imagine what's next in mobile banking; some are starting their own accelerators. Meanwhile, the latest research estimates that U.S. mobile payments, currently at $3.7 billion, will grow to $142 billion within five years. Now an industry not exactly known for speed is approaching 2015 with an ethos that sounds more Silicon Valley than Wall Street, touting visions of fridges that shop for you, Google Glass and Oculus Rifts, and the kind of futuristic security they hope will inspire consumers to trust them and their technology in the first place. I like that both a local book shop, and the coffeehouse nearest my house, have bitcoin kiosks.
Yet they were among the first to adopt computers back in the 1950s.
Actually, that is the problem. Because they adopted computers so early, they are now stuck with slow legacy systems. It is similar to the situation with phone companies: America used to have the best in the world, because of investments in computers and automation. But today we have one of the worst telecom systems, because we are stuck with outdated systems, while other countries computerized with much newer technology.