The Power of Mobile Banking: How to Profit from the Revolution in Retail Financial Services

CHAPTER 3 Welcome to Generation M

“See and Hear” Replacing “Touch and Smell”

Now is the proper time to check in with my good friend Brett King. Many of you have heard of Brett’s company, Moven, which is essentially a mobile bank. I asked Brett why he decided to launch a mobile bank and why he thinks the timing for such a venture might be just right.

I was a little surprised when Brett did not begin his answer with a discussion of banking per se. Instead, he spoke at length about the differences between baby boomers or Gen Xers and the millennials of Generation Y or digital natives of Generation Z.

Brett refers to this new demographic as Generation M. From Brett’s point of view, the M doesn’t stand for millennial. It stands for mobile.

Let me share with you some quotes from Brett’s blog on the Huffington Post:

Baby Boomers and Gen-X have in common the need to experience life in all its glory. Whether that is born out of a sense of adventure, the need for tactile feedback or in the sense of face-to-face social connections, at the core of much of our buying behavior historically has been the need to “touch and feel” a product before a purchase. There’s a subtle shift in this behavior with Gen-Y and Gen-Z/Digital Natives (sometimes collectively called Generation-M or, as Time Magazine called them, the “multi-tasking” generation) that is critical to understand if you are going to engage this community successfully moving forward, and it emphasizes why the physical store is under ...