For better or worse, each of these memorable banking encounters involves actual human interaction. But as we look to automate all these banking processes, how will the customer experience change? That was the topic of a talk during this year’s Fintech Week London. The roundtable of banking branders and startups asked, as we get more technical, how can we keep the customer experience personal?

In regulated financial sector, transformation must start with company culture

Matt Bagwell, managing director of Naked Communications branding agency, works with traditional banks on how they will design the branch of the future and build around mobile-first services. During the talk, he warned, “Larger banks shouldn’t be concerned about threats outside but rather those inside. If the larger Internet players are coming into the space, that means just more players disrupting,” but you can only survive the next decade by rebuilding from within before looking out.

However, while startup innovation has proven the success of bottom-up innovation, if you ask most in the banking space, they’re going to say that this has to be a top-down change.

“A lot of these businesses, they need to change or they won’t be alive in five years’ time.” said Peter Veash, founder of The BIO Agency in 2006, which helps major businesses like banking increase their innovation. “Most boards now realize that they need to change, and they realize they can’t do that in the current organizational model.”

Leash says, to survive, banks have to ignore the systems, processes and even overall brands in order to break down the very real barriers and to allow cross-company, cross-discipline teams to interact together and plan the next direction.

He also advocates for banks encouraging a kind of startup culture by allowing a team or two from within to branch off as their own innovation incubators. While this sounds like something normal to those of us in the tech and/or startup spaces, this is a radical idea for banking. This is why Leash recommends that for any banking world innovation, you need to have at least one board-level sponsor, which he says is “the only way to get change done.”

But Bagwell warns that if you don’t map this innovation and change to employees’ key performance objectives, then this change simply won’t happen. “If it’s not locked to KPIs then they won’t understand and it won’t be that much of a success.” Only from there, he says, can you motivate your team.

Where are fintech startups beating big banks?

 Seventy-one percent of millennials would rather go to the dentist than listen to anything their bank has to say. There’s no doubt that my generation is grasping for alternatives to traditional—boring—banking.

This talk had a mixed group because it had marketeers that work with the big guys and then Tristan Thomas who is undeniably part of one of the little guys. He works for Mondo, a smartphone-first bank, “for people who want to get things done in a click and who don’t see the need for branches and cheque books.” This soon-to-be bank has a focus on transparency, within its own company and for the financial literacy of its customers.

Sounds great, right? But, as the moderator pointed out, fintech startups like Mondo have a long way to go because they simply can’t compete with the trust and heritage built by—and sometimes burned by—these legacy banks.

One way for the fintech startup to have an edge over the traditional big bank is its much shorter distance to customer.

“For us it’s about giving people back control over their money,” Thomas said. “With a traditional bank, you can spend and it’s very difficult to know where the money is going. For us, it is about giving you that information when you spend it, and enabling you to live your life so you don’t have to worry about your money so much.”

Big banks need to build this level of transparency into their own technological disruption. And transparency has to be part of any new marketing strategy.

“I think people are interested in the stories behind brands,” Bagwell said. “We work with brands as they establish themselves and as they move forward, [helping them understand] what it means to be transparent. What is your story you wanna tell? What does innovative mean to those who you want to engender trust with?”

It’s also about communicating your transparency and what you have to offer to your average customer—not just the type of people who would willfully sit through a Fintech conference. “We’re fascinated with change and technology, but we may not all be representative of the mass market,” Bagwell pointed out. Speaking of the every day retail banking customer, he said “I think we are five years ahead of where they might be and I think we have to be responsible to help them get there.”

Thomas admitted that a lot of Mondo’s first customers are the traditional early adopters and tech geeks. Banks large and small, new and old, need to stop talking about the technology and start showing off the benefits. Bagwell defines that as creating banking services that are simple, seamless, and with the proper amount of friction, meaning easy to use, but with security and privacy in place.

And if you’re wanting to build trust, that means taking consumer-first principles to heart. Bagwell says even follow what all the fastest-growing startups like Uber are doing as a matter of course: The customer is always right.

And that’s just what Thomas said Mondo is doing. “Trying to give people as much of a say as possible because it contrasts so much with other banks.”

Which banking and fintech startups are chaining the way we bank? Who are the most transparent and who are missing the mark? Tweet us your thoughts @TefDigital and @JKRiggins so maybe we can write about them next!