YouSaid · the spoken record

Gareth H. Jones

lines on the record: 23
first: 2019-04-30
most recent: 2019-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Originally Irish heritage, so my family would be an Irish immigrant who came over in the 50s and literally if I look at my mother who is probably a fantastic saver she saves all her life. She always told me when she came to this country she always had enough money saved for an emergency if she needed to go home. That was her main sort of starting point. In fact they saved, they bought a house, they thrived, they took their kids for education and our background was very much around working hard, managing our money, looking after our money, and then growing and developing. And I think like many immigrant families, it was that starting a life and then building out from there and creating a platform for our future. I have two sons now. And actually what my values are in terms of how can I give them the best start in life?”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's just the speed of change, the number of branches have disappeared, ATMs arrived, telephone banking arrived, mobile apps arrived, contactless payments arrived, every couple of years there's new innovation in the world. We just see constant change and I think banks have been fantastic at adapting and at the same time they've adapted very slowly to that part to it. So a lot of things they've done really really well but the core thing is looking after customers”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I think back first of all, I think it really grounded me in terms of what we do, which it's actually we look after customers and we look after customers' money and their lives and we help them thrive. And that has always stayed with me in terms of that core grounding in terms of what we do. What's changed in some ways is in terms of how we deliver that. Everything is faster now. When I first started banking, it was a much more personal service. We knew the people, it was local banking, it was on a high street, you knew the customers who came in every week. There was definitely conversations and relationships. Now it's much more impersonal, but you're still doing the same thing for people, so you transact with much more people, much faster. It's efficiency now rather than the actual personal service. But I still think if you think back to what they're trying to achieve and you think there's a custom at the end of it, it's not about ten pounds moving, it's someone's wages, it's someone's paying for something. If you always think about what they need for their money and what they're doing.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've been in the industry a long time ago? It definitely feels like it. I fell into banking, really it wasn't necessarily my ambition in life to become a banker, but I took a summer job in a Nat West branch in the mid eighties, and I never left. I started off in branches, I moved into the head offices, I went on a management program which gave me a good general management training, and then I moved into private banking, so I worked for Coots& Cove for a while, and then moved into direct banking, so I helped launch ING Direct in the UK, which was one of the early startup direct banks. Spent ten years there running mainly marketing, and I think the core role I probably liked the most was marketing and product, communicating with our customers, developing products, developing services that customers really wanted and understanding what their needs was and actually delivering that. And I've been fortunate to run a number of products across savings, loans, business, banking, across a few banks now, but I've mainly been in the UK banking sector in that area.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a bank, we have an inherent responsibility to look after our customers' money, their information, their data, and that doesn't change whether you're a physical branch or a digital branch. It's the same inherent responsibility. The technology that people can use to break into online things, it just changes the landscape, but it hasn't changed the problem in terms of where we are. So we're in a constant fight to actually take security and to keep ahead of protecting that customer's data and money. We invest an awful lot of time and effort to make sure we're ahead of that curve. But it's something that I think will never stop for us in terms of there will always be people who don't want to do good things. Our job is actually protect monies. And banks started hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago looking after people's money. That's what we do now. We just do it in a different landscape.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“do know is that there is a whole generation of people who don't use mobiles who aren't comfortable online that still need to be served by branches. That generation will reduce over time by making it easier and easier as the mobile becomes more of your view. more will be done over that, and China's probably a great example if you look at the WeChats of the world who are doing everything on the phone, there's a part for that, but I don't think the branch is dead yet.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's very hard to predict the future with any accuracy, but what I would say is the industry has changed massively over time, and it feels today like the mobile phone will be everything. So I look today, and maybe in 10 years' time I'll look back and think, why was anyone looking at their mobile phone and it's a different world? Where you do see is that people want things to be faster, people want things to be easier, it's not necessarily about the technology per se, it's about the experience that they have. And if we can deliver things quicker, and I always think about Amazon and the uniqueness of Amazon which says today they're opening branches on high streets to actually get things sort of given to you and where shops have done really, really well is about distributing products faster to people. So I don't think it's necessarily about are we going to be on our mobile? I think it's just about that we'll consume products faster and whether that's in mobile, whether it's in faster ways to get to the high street, it doesn't matter.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I think of the positives first of all, you have all the fun of a startup with the backing of, in our case, a 150-year-old company behind you. So you have an awful lot of security, you have investment behind you, and you also have a lot of governance behind you. So you have to rigor and challenge and the risk control that makes you just act a little bit safer and a little bit more rounded in terms of how you operate. The negative sometimes is that can slow you down a little bit. In a smaller fintech or a startup, you can be more nimble. You get involved in more parts to it. You don't necessarily have as many people in the conversations. That has positive sides in terms of your speed, not necessarily the rig of some of those conversations. I almost have the best of both wells in terms of how I operate. I run effectively a startup business which has lots of energy, great culture, great people. But I've got the backing of this huge firm behind me, so I've got like a big brother or a big uncle who has their arms around.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“FinTechs have a great advantage coming into this market. They have no legacy, so they're not like the old banks of war with decades old systems, old profit pools. They come in with a fresh sheet of paper. The challenge is they don't necessarily have a balance sheet or the capital or the scale to really penetrate, but some of them are creating an awful lot of noise around customer experience. And what they have tapped into is a certain knowledge about how to make things easy for customers, how to present information in such a way, and how to actually pick one problem and solve it really well. So there's lots of things that we can learn from the fintechs, and if you look at the user experience, how they've actually grown, some of had no marketing at all in terms of its being word of mouth and advocacy. They've really tapped into the millennium in the earlier adopter, sort of segment, and they've used that social media to grow their business, but what they are really doing is they're solving a customer problem, and that's where banks can learn if they solve customer problems and they make that less.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marcus stands for in its heart is a custom sent its simple, transparent offer that gives value to our customers, and if we do that as an industry, our consumers will be better off, they'll save more, they'll manage their money better, and they'll like banks more as well.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the hardest things in terms of barriers to save is habit. You have to get into the habit of saving and having easy access and the easy way to move money. So what we find is that an awful lot of products now are just riddled with catches and conditions about why you have to do something. We have products in the UK where, you know, and I sort of exaggerate a little bit, but you can put your money in and then you can only withdraw money on the third Wednesday of a month if it's a full moon and those types of conditions just complicate things. So people have trade-offs in order to get great returns. They have to make sacrifices and compromises all the time. And I don't know why as an industry sometimes we think this is a good thing that we always have a tease of a great rate and then all these conditions behind it which actually just put people off. So we just need simpler products and I think that's the core thing that we need to do. Simple, straightforward products that give customers value and are transparent are the things.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we need to turn it into a customer centric operation which actually talks about what customers need and what they're fulfilling. So no one actually has a savings account to save money. They save for a goal, they save for a purpose. We need to change the language a little bit from millennials so they actually understand what they're aiming for. And if we can do that, I think we can help them manage their money earlier than maybe we did in our ages and progress further in life.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we see is that if you look at how millennials consume information, they use social media, they use advisors, they use their trusted circle to tell them more. So where we found out from maybe our parents, from advertising, from TV ads, millennials use social media to actually inform them. And we see that twice as many of our followers are millennials on our social pages. They're the people who look at our advertising in that space. So they want advice, they want easy to do. But what I would say is millennials also want instant gratification. They're used to technology. They're much more able to get things done correct way. You know, they go on the phone, they swipe their thumb across the phone and it happens. They're used to that instant gratification. And that's, I think, what we need to do. We need to deploy technology for them. We need to make it easy for them. We need to explain it in a way that exists. And what banks have done historically is they've created products and silos that help the banks operate their money.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world is moving more digitally all the time. People use their phones all the time to actually operate. Digital banking is just growing generally. Germany for us is a phenomenal next step opportunity because of the size of the market, the nature of the German saver who wants to actually grow and the level of competition that's there. So it's probably the largest single market for us, but also pigs like France, Italy, Spain, they all offer opportunities for us over time. But for us, our entry strategy will be around the scale of the opportunity, the appetite for those customers, the low rates that are often the level of competition, and we think probably Germany is our next logical step.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An order amount of time talked training them and spending weeks actually working up to make sure that the service they gave was great. We now have something like fifty agents who look after our customers. We typically try to answer the phone within seconds. People don't have to wait to hold on to the phone with us. And our call center initially was beside us in London. It will stay in London, but we're also opening a new call centre in Milton Keynes. That centre will have up to 250 agents over time as we grow the business out. And we're really excited because it's an opportunity not just to be a digital bank, but we're a direct bank when customers choose to phone us they can actually deal with us on the telephone as well as online.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we were launching Marcus in the UK we spent quite a lot of time thinking about what did we want the Marcus experience to be and although we were an online bank what we found was people still need to phone us up sometimes so people still have questions people still have concerns and that's a moment of truth for us when a customer phones so there are some things that we thought were very very important one was that we wouldn't hide our telephone number on our website ideal with so many companies where I try to phone them and I spend the next hour trying to find their phone numbers and ironically that's normally telephone companies at that point we also wouldn't have an IVR we didn't want customers to go through press one press two press three you now have a whole new set of options underneath it we just wanted to be able to actually if someone wants a phone us they can talk to us quickly recruiting agents who were used to dealing with customer service they came from retailers they were people who had a really good customer attitude and we spent”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You look around the world, it's difficult to see cultural or psychological factors in itself. Are people savers or spenders? As a younger person, I was definitely a spender, you know, with my needs for more and as I got older, I became a saver because I started to think slightly longer term. It's more of a natural thing to do as you accumulate more wealth. But I'm not sure there's a cultural difference. I know in Germany it's probably a fascinating country because 8% of their GDP is actually saved every year. That need to save is definitely ingrained into that culture. I don't think necessarily in the Anglo-Saxon world or in different cultures you see that as much. It fills me more of an individual thing and I think what your education, what you brought up, what your needs are.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at the UK first very much quantitative easing, ring fencing, the retail banks are wash with liquidity, so they don't need savings. If you take that out to Europe, it's very similar. It's been low interest rates for a long time, so again people need to say, but the returns and the incentives that banks give to them is much lower in that part to it. That's spread out into all over the beta world post of financial crisis.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether that's really driven behaviour is yet to be seen in some ways because in some ways that's added more complexity to the market people don't necessarily understand should I have this tax-free savings account or that tax free savings account? So I think there's a drive for simplicity. So policy has been in the good way but there's still more that can be done.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's been a lot of debate and changes in the UK market from the government and the regulators to try and help people to save. So if I think of some of the changes that have been made in the last few years, the personal savings allowance was introduced which actually made all savings tax-free for the first thousand pounds for normal rate taxpayers and £500 for high rate taxpayers. That was due to incentivize people. They've also introduced individual savings accounts and schemes to actually help people get on the housing ladder by saving for deposits. So it's definitely an incentive within the government to put savings back on the gender and there's a realization that low interest rates haven't helped savings so trying to do anything from a government point of view which drives savings behavior or puts savings back on the agenda or gets people on to savings habits has definitely worked.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ten years of low interest rates, you know, savings was almost like a forgotten category within banking and also for consumers. And what we saw was that banks in some way has lost interest in savings and savers. They weren't talking about it. It was like, when was the last time you saw a savings product advertised? And customers had lost interest in savings. Apathy about what they would get is not worth their while switching. Why not leave my money with my current account, an account paying virtually no interest at all? That apathy really kicked in after tent long years of low interest. So what we saw when we came in, and one of the reasons Marcus was a success is we put savings back on the agenda. And our starting point was actually we wanted to put the interest back into savings. That wasn't just about paying a great rate to our customers. It was actually to put savings back on the agenda.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, there wasn't much reward for saving in the wake of the financial crisis. One thing that's obvious when we launched Marcus here in the UK versus the US is there's a much more active debate around getting a fair rate of return on your deposits. Why do you think the debate's so much more robust here than it is elsewhere?”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The UK is definitely a nation of savers before we launch Marcus we interviewed three thousand different consumers to ask how they saved what they thought about savings, and we found that eighty five percent of people put some money aside every month just to save it for a rainy day for a holiday for a purchase. That nature of savings being good, but what we also found is actually people aren't very good at saving. So although they're trying to save, twenty five percent of people didn't have savings account at all, they just either left their money in their current account or actually lots of people just left at home lying around in little pockets. And we found even 1% of people actually literally left it under the mattress. So it was quite scary that a decade of low interest rates post the financial crisis had just seen that people try to save but they're just not good at it.”
2019-04-30 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Why Are Savings Rates Back in Focus in the UK? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT