Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns, and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Welcome to Breaking Banks. I am your host, of course, Brett King, and we are in our 10th year of Breaking Banks. It’s going to be 11 years soon.

You know, it’s coming pretty quickly. We are excited to have an author, a guest that’s been on the show before, but is back on the show. He’s the author of a book called Attention Hacking, the Power of Social Media Selling in Insurance and Finance.

Robin Kira, welcome back to Breaking Banks. Thank you very much for having me. And where are you reaching us from today? Because we are a global show.

That’s for sure. As you may have listened or hear from my accent, you know, I’m from France. No kidding.

I’m from Germany, Hamburg, Germany. And yeah, we are here. We live in Hamburg, Germany.

Very good. So I’ve been doing research for my new book and, you know, Germany just hit the 50% mark, half the number of bank branches that they have this year, compared with their peak, which was back in 2007, which was 40,000. So they’re at 19,000 odd branches now.

So this is a trend that we’re seeing all across Europe and across the developed world, of course. But it’s interesting to sort of look at how fintech, particularly in respect to digital acquisition, is really reshaping the way we think about banking. You know, all of these far rapidly growing banks like Revolut, you know, Monzo, Starling, you know, in Brazil, Nubank, Chime in the US, WeBank in China and so forth, all built off this digital acquisition capability, as are these mobile wallets in the space.

And so, you know, you talk a lot about social media selling. Where does that come into the ability of these organizations to be so successful at digital onboarding compared with traditional players? Well, when a lot of players are going down the performance marketing route, amazing search engine optimization, advertisement, and I think the challenger banks and also some traditional banks who went down that road early have shown us how to win and excite customers, also have a great front end. But I think if everybody does it at some point, you don’t have a competitive edge anymore, or you’re super great at it.

But, you know, people are changing jobs, they’re changing a performance marketing agency. So I think it’s a little bit of a leveling field for everybody who is in there, if you look at different regions. And what we’ve seen, actually, that social media, if you go into the organic route, or a little bit of pay to but not into the performance marketing way, actually is another way how to get attention.

And you started by saying that the regional branches, the local branches are dying away. And that’s for sure. But my book makes the point that when you’re a salesperson, and you build up a reach on social media, and can be in your village, in your part of town, or as a mutual local community bank, you actually can fight the trend, because there always will be people that want to have a person to talk to or to yell at, and not to have the digital contact only.

You know, but I mean, you know, I’m having this debate with my co authors on the book, which, you know, my book’s coming out called Branch Day Gone Tomorrow, right? And I’ve been having this debate with the co authors who say, you know, often say this. But the reality is, you know, I do think there’s a generational shift here. You know, I think, like Ron Chevlin, who’s a big commentator, as you know, in the US, he just wrote a Forbes, you know, article on this a few weeks ago saying, Gen Y’s and sorry, not, yeah, Gen Z’s in particular, millennials to some extent, but Gen Z’s and alphas in particular, they don’t want to go to the branch.

This is a big change from if you look at other generations that people will often say the reason they choose a specific bank is there’s a branch near their home or their office for exactly that issue. If they have a problem, they’ve got someone to yell at. But increasingly, you know, I mean, the approach that digital players are taking is they’re designing out those moments.

They’re designing out the moments where you need to speak to a human, they’re just they’re perfecting that service aspect in terms of design and its alignment with customers needs. And then if you look at NewBank, NewBank has the highest referral rate of any bank in Latin America, you know, and they’re the fastest growing, they’re the largest by number of customers as well. So, you know, this is because they don’t have branches.

And, you know, if you were to say that there is still, you know, a component of that, I think what we’re seeing is that, you know, if you are going to have branches in the future, I think they have to be there to support digital. And I don’t want to take over your segment on this because I want to talk about the book more. But I am curious as to why the sort of modality shift that now is becoming fairly clear around the world.

This has happened in banking, you know, more people now get a mobile wallet or sign up for a digital only bank account than they do traditional plays. You know, 80% of new bank account openings in the West now are done digitally. But that hasn’t happened in the same way with insurance.

You know, insurance, is it because insurers have not had that pressure from insurer techs coming in and doing a lot more selling? Or is it the nature of the type of insurance sales that are happening? What do you think? Well, the book goes about insurance and banks, but let’s talk about insurance. So why has that not happened yet in insurance? I think there are three reasons. Number one is we have not seen insurer tech really eating away market share as you have described in banking for new business or certain products lines, for example, new accounts.

And we have not seen this in insurance happen. And we more have seen that insurer tech is actually pivoting away from being an attacker to an enabler. A lot of companies have, you know, built technology, have not won a customer and now are providing this technology actually to incumbents.

So that’s one trend we’ve seen in insurance. Second, I think it’s the complexity of the products. Why? Don’t get me wrong.

I think every insurance product can be sold online. So it’s not the distribution that’s complicated, but it’s how to build it, regulatory requirements. And people don’t understand it right away.

If you’re not a specialist to understand liability insurance, to understand a household insurance, I think that’s super difficult to understand that. So what we have seen is, and people are reluctant to change it, to change it for certain product lines, car insurance, people change every year, life insurance, long-term care insurance, not. So what I want to say is it’s the complexity of the products that has saved the insurance industry a little bit.

And also it’s a big pain to change a policy. If you want to apply for a new health insurance or a supplementary health insurance, you need to, I don’t know, open the last 10 years of your medical history. I can’t remember when I was in the hospital the last time.

Was it before to the year 2000 or after? I don’t know. And so I think that’s also a big topic. So it’s easier to change a bank account, have an automatic pull of all data from it.

But we have not seen that. And the third regulatory requirements, we have seen open banking, PSC2, which has really pushed, I think, open banking and all that this has to do with it. And we have not seen open insurance yet.

So I think that’s a little bit. Yeah. Which, as you just pointed out, with medical data, for example, we need that sort of openness, you know, to be shared amongst, you know, insurers to be more competitive and things like that.

You know, so I think. So, I mean, let’s get back to the book. You talk about integrating social media into sort of the financial services framework.

When we look at the biggest brands in financial services, they still struggle with this. They still struggle with social media in terms of its role. I remember classically, I won’t say which bank it was, I mean, if people that know me probably guess, but, you know, a global, but based in Europe bank.

And I infamously in 2010, went to meet the head of marketing. And the head of marketing, I asked them why they had banned Facebook in their premises. And, you know, the answer was, well, we ban all social media because we want to define the conversation about our brand.

You know, we want to own that and we don’t want, and I’m like, but so I just did a search on the brand name on Twitter at the time and showed him that the conversation is going on without you, you know, you need to participate. This is a reason you need to participate. And if you’re banning it internally for staff to use, then you’ve got no learning curve either.

So, you know, it wasn’t that long ago that social media was really problematic for these brands, but who was doing really well at this stuff? When you look at insurers and banks, there are a few that do it really well. We just did a study on the largest banks in the world. There are some that do a decent job on LinkedIn, some American banks, investment banks, do a very good job for that target group.

So it’s not going viral, having millions of views, but if you look at what is the target group, they do actually a good job on it. And you have some smaller and midsize companies that do a good job, but mostly driven by young or young minded decision makers that has nothing to do with age, has a different mindset and that really say, oh, I really want to push this and understand what it actually means. But I see a shift.

I see a shift also because of people have actually working, have been working on the industry and said, guys, you really need to change something. And I see the change slowly actually arriving with a new generation of decision makers. And we recently, I don’t only write books in my free time, but I have a marketing agency in Germany.

And what we do, what we just recently have a large pitch in actually providing digital service to sales organization doesn’t matter at this point. But what I want to say is the decision makers involve the board, 50% young and young minded. They’re on LinkedIn and others 50%, but making important decisions are not on the topic.

And I think that has been a big factor that decision makers do not taste it themselves. And so that’s a big part of why it has not happened yet. But to be quite honest, even the big insurtech and fintech mostly suck at social media and content marketing.

And I don’t know why, but to be quite honest, yeah, I don’t know why. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you back in the day, when we were doing moving in 2013 and 2014, it was fairly easy to differentiate.

I remember just the fact that I would answer like statements made by customers on social media, I would answer them directly. And they were like, yeah, they were amazed, you know, now, okay. We didn’t, you know, we had, you know, 250,000 or so customers at the time, right.

In various guys. So it was manageable. I couldn’t do it with 80 million like new bank, obviously.

But, you know, but, but you’re right. It’s sort of about that culture. Do you think there’s sort of a cultural reckoning taking place where you have to have a certain level of competency on social media as one of these players now? Totally, because there are some that do a good job, like ING Bank does an amazing job.

If you will look at banking here over here in Europe, you have some non-banking companies where you would not expect it from like, I don’t know, the German, the German ban, but the German train company, government, oh, they do a great job. I think they have a great agency on their side. It’s not us.

They have a great agency probably, or they’re a very small team that’s detached from the whole bureaucracy because they do really fun and crazy stuff. So shout out to them, or even government owned other companies do a great job, which is have a similar culture as banks have. And yeah.

All right, cool. Well, the book is called Attention Hacking. So let’s get specific, you know, give us some, give us some tricks of the trade, you know, give us some strategic insight here, some, some techniques or tools that you recommend in the book that should be the go-to, you know, sort of stack for people trying to get this right.

Okay. So of course there is a how-to manual in the book, but you need to buy it. I’m just kidding.

I can share it anyway. So what do you, I think it’s not about the channel. It’s not about, oh, you need to be good at LinkedIn.

You need to be good at TikTok. It’s about one thing. You need to be good at where your customer is.

It sounds really crazy, but it is applies to B2B salespeople, but it also applies to the branch manager. It applies to the insurance agent or in the marketing department. You need to be where the people are.

And I think that in search engine advertisement, actually the new challenger banks have done a great job at actually attacking incumbents there and are there in the social, in the search engines where the customers are. You need to be there where the customer is. And it means don’t fall in love with the channel.

You know, we are super strong in TikTok. I think it will have a run for a few more years, but now, you know, Instagram threads is coming up and you have some other social media platforms. So always try out the new stuff.

And when you see that it’s going viral- That’s Gary V’s thing, right? Gary V’s always like you should be experimenting with this stuff. Yeah, but it’s very important also as a decision maker to do it and agree there with Gary, you need to experiment with it. Not that you need to become the most, the best expert on that, but why is it important that you experiment with it? Because you can make a profound decision.

Is it really going hot or not? Because agencies and internal experts are standing line in your front office as a decision maker and try to sell you something, you know, but if you can say, oh no, for example, we are testing Twitter back and forth in case Elon Musk does some great move there and we are there, but we don’t see it or feel it. So we can go to our clients and say, you know, Twitter for you does not make sense at this point for a lot of companies it does, but for some companies it doesn’t, or it’s not a positive surprise. But, you know, Instagram threads, for example, is something that just recently released a few days ago here in Germany.

It can be a viable move or WhatsApp channel. So it’s always tried out and as a decision maker, you need to do it in order to really make a profound decision. But when you have made one, then you can pass it on to internal or external experts.

Why? Because you don’t want to be a typical insurer. I can ask you a quick question, when do you think the last German insurer proudly announced that he is also now on Facebook? When did that happen? Probably three months ago. Yeah.

Last year. Yeah. So, but I mean, think about it.

What I know. Culturally in the whole organization. And it makes a press release.

Right. And nobody says, screen stop, the emperor has no clothes on. Yeah.

And I think I think it’s a disaster. And it says a lot. And you so you need an organization, actually, where I have another example, another example, for example, a small insurer in Germany, classical car insurer called OCC, they build up this internal and external competency.

And when Clubhouse came along these two days, it was popular, they were on it. So it was really interesting to see that suddenly they could react. It didn’t work out.

But hey, then all the biggest TikTok channel a few months later, they went on TikTok full scale. So I think that shows you can win a lot with with being early and going on. But again, if you’re a large organization, as a decision maker, try it out yourself in order to make a profound decision and then you can pass it on.

And to be quite honest, we’re talking about non-existing budgets. And even as a multi-billion dollar bank. It’s still the same problem in digital generally, right? There’s lack of budget.

No, I would say. Comparative to other parts of the business. I mean, close the branch and you can become market leader on social media.

I know. That’s it, right? I mean, that’s the economics, how the economics look. It’s so incredibly, you know, swayed.

You’ve mentioned TikTok a few times, Robin. So it appears to me and certainly for the team at Breaking Banks that right now today, and for me as a keynote speaker, by far the most effective form of social media is short form video. Like it’s performing 5, 10x better than anything else that we post right now.

And I know this is time sensitive and it’s likely to change in the future. But you know, what are some good short form approaches you’ve seen? So on TikTok, we have a B2C channel where over half a million people are following us. And we have up to 20 million views each month.

So just to have a dimension, and we produce between 5 and 10,000 short videos each year for us and our clients. So what is the secret? The secret is really have a look at current popular formats. As a keynote speaker, take the high notes, the high points of your keynote out, do like a 10 to 25 second video or a 1 minute, 1 minute 30 video out of it.

But what you don’t want to do is take your YouTube video, image video nobody looked at, and put that into 9 to 60 format and put it on TikTok, they will fail miserably. And it’s really you need to, yeah, I mean, we know banks and insurers to do it. And then say, Oh, you’ll see social media doesn’t work.

The image video, nobody watched it already. It’s not going viral. And what I think one thing that changed really over the last 18 months is before 18 months, you and your I don’t know, a teenager in his room could become in TikTok famous, this time is over, because you have a lot of professionals right now there.

So what my biggest tick or tip there is, you need to get some professional help internal or external to do that, because the algorithms are brutal. What do you and you know, you need to start with a good hook with a good start with a good joke, and then explain something. So my big tip is look at successful creators, copy them, not copy, but you know, be inspired and rebuild it, how they structure it, and then try it out.

And, and I think that’s the biggest, biggest tip there. And yeah, that, you know, there was a trend for a while that the like the, the World Economic Forum videos, they were a template for people to do, you know, with some, you know, B roll and some images and some text overlaid and things like that. But yeah, now the short form stuff is, is really interesting, you know, in terms of it is, we are learning to consume content in much shorter soundbites, you know, and shorter form, it’s like, I’ll be sitting there watching TV on my TV sometimes, and I’ll be flicking between Netflix, I’ll start watching a Netflix show, and I flicked to something else.

And then I flicked to YouTube. And, you know, it takes discipline now to sit and watch an hour long or an hour half long, you know, movie or something, because we’ve just got so used to this highly consumable content. So it’s, you know, it must have some sort of cultural impact.

You know, and that’s part of the drive. It’s showing that the attention span goes down. And then you produce a video or a post or a book where the point is made only after 100 pages or after 100 seconds, the people scroll, it’s ruthless.

Isn’t it also democratizing that, you know, people are not being forced by a few editors to read not good content. Or being subjected to these TV commercials, just to watch your favorite TV show. Yeah, exactly.

We are really famous for being anti-commercial. Why? Not because we’re not liking capitalism, but because I cannot stand bad, bad movies. And commercials are actually bad movies.

Pushing down this bush, being pushed down the throat of the consumers by ad. And, you know, actually, you know, you’re getting chained to your sofa and you need to watch this horrible message. So you’ve got to come to Thailand, dude.

You know, Thailand, the ads are hilarious in Thailand. They’re funny as. But anyway, which is part of what you’re talking about.

So another aspect of this, because I want to get to this before we finish up, is the ethical and regulatory approach to this. You know, obviously, with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and, you know, even what’s been happening with Elon lately on X, there’s a lot of questions about the ethical standards behind this. So, but, you know, you often also see that these really aggressive marketing techniques, particularly for things like mobile gaming and stuff like that, they do have a measure of success.

You know, TikTok itself, in terms of its growth, came from some pretty clever marketing, you could argue. So where do you sit in terms of where you think that those sort of ethical standards are going to go for this space? Well, I’m old school. You know, you have in central Europe also a whole community of coaches and consultants and rip off artists and scam artists.

I always urge companies, banks and insurers to play long game. But the funny thing is, most of them do. So my argument is, it’s a little bit like when you get rich, when you get rich, you reveal your true character.

It’s the same when you have a powerful tool as social media, you reveal your true character. And as a company or individual, I only can urge people to be the nice person you are, also to your neighbor in the street. And so I think also, I don’t condemn platforms because they just multiply the effect and the kindness or the opposite of people.

So our philosophy or my philosophy is also, I didn’t write it actually explicitly in the book, but I may do it for the next one to say you need to be kind and nice and honest and old school. And I think there is a new way of old school there in the world that’s super fast changing. One funny thing, I’m not sure how you feel about it, but yes, I see a lot of digital business and there’s e-commerce, there are online platforms, online accounts.

I totally get this, but a lot of business is still being done between humans, especially in the B2B space. So I strongly believe also in the human game. Well, I do think there’s going to be a reckoning for the corporate world in that as climate change and AI technology based on employment and so forth, as this kicks in, if you really don’t have your eyes dotted and your T’s crossed in terms of your social responsibility, then you’re going to be seen as a bad actor.

So I do think that there’s going to have to be a fairly significant change the way corporations are integrated into the world, into society in terms of benefit. I think that that’s a cultural shift that’s probably likely to occur. Not everyone agrees with me on that.

Some think the corpos will take over, like the cyberpunk world. But anyway, look, we’ve run out of time, Doc, but I will just ask you to tell us, first of all, for those listening, the book is Attention Hacking, the Power of Social Media Selling in Insurance and Finance. But Robin, where can people find out more information about the book and about yourself if they’re interested in this topic? Yeah, watch me.

Don’t go on TikTok because it’s crazy. And it’s a B2C channel, in German. The book, you can actually find on Amazon.

And we don’t make a lot of money from it. So it’s really about spreading the word to salespeople around the world, how to use it, and people in marketing and insurance and banks. If you want to contact me, drop me a note on LinkedIn, or go to our homepage, digitalscouting.de, or say hi at one of the next conferences I might attend.

I’m looking forward to giving you a high five. And maybe if COVID is finally over, also a hug. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It would be great, dude. I don’t know when I’ll next be in Hamburg, but I do get to Germany now and again. So yeah, absolutely.

Very good to see you. Thanks for dropping by. Thank you very much for your time and giving me the opportunity.

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