Facebook Introduces Their Own Cryptocurrency - Introducing Libra

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over at WSI Digital where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about us at And all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI Online at www.poweredbywsi.com. It's been a couple of weeks since I have been able to do a live show, so I appreciate those of you that have tuned in live and tolerated my absence. I apologize for kind of leaving you hanging every once in a while, but we're back. Probably an abbreviated show because I suspect the vast majority of our Typical audience is probably getting ready for the 4th of July holiday here in the States. So if that is the case, certainly a very happy 4th of July, Independence Day. To those of you that are out there, for my Canadian friends, hope you had a great Canada Day earlier this week and enjoyed your time off. But wanted to at least make sure we had an opportunity to say hello, to make sure that everybody knew and remembered that I'm still out here and still doing the shows. Just sometimes live is a little difficult to accomplish in the travel world. Just as a point of reference, a couple of weeks ago I actually had an opportunity to get to Alaska for my very first time ever. We went on a family trip To celebrate this year being my parents' 50th wedding anniversary year, so the entire family, my brother and his family, and my wife and myself. Unfortunately, we couldn't take our dogs on the boat, but it it is what it is. We got to go on a cruise to Alaska and see some amazing things. And if you ever get an opportunity to head to Alaska, I would strongly encourage you take advantage of that. It's a beautiful place. The people are super friendly. Yeah, it's a little bit of a haul to get there, but definitely well worth it. And if you are someone that likes the outdoors, hunting, fishing, just basically clean air and healthy living, it's an awesome place to go. So I would strongly encourage you to do that. The week after I returned from Alaska, immediately hit the road and headed down to Indianapolis and Columbus conducting Marketing Director Forum meetings. You may recall, those of you that are frequent flyers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, we've got a little bit of a banking niche that we've developed here at our WSI agency. And so I serve the Indiana Bankers and the Community Bankers of Ohio associations as a facilitator to their marketing forums. And that gives me an opportunity to be in a room of a bunch of really, really smart bank marketing folks talking about things that are of interest to them and on their mind. And Those basically go all day. I will tell you, coming back from a week in Alaska, four-hour time lag, three-hour drive, three-hour drive—it took quite a bit out of me, which is another reason why we didn't have a meeting or I guess a webinar last week. I was in in meetings, but also super duper tired. So I apologize. I'm going to try to make sure. My finger hits the mute button. But if you've ever had one of those little sicknesses that kind of kicks you down a little bit, when you start feeling better, eventually you'll get to the point where you're not feeling so bad, but you can only talk for so long until the lungs kind of tap out and say, we're going to need to have a little bit of a cough here. So hopefully I don't cough in your ear. If I do, I apologize. But those marketing forums were a great opportunity to really plug in. And if you are joining us in the Free Webinar Wednesday world and you're not in the banking space, that's okay. Because while we certainly talk a lot about banking, there's a lot of things that bankers do that other businesses should be doing as well. So we talk in those meetings a lot about The digital advertising strategies and customer engagement and chatbot functionality and mobile messaging. So certainly a number of those things came up and we may work some of that into a future Free Webinar Wednesdays. One of the things that I wanted to talk about, and you can see I've got Facebook's new cryptocurrency here, that's going to be kind of the bulk of what I want to just talk about a little bit today. But one of the concepts that we introduced in both of those marketing forum sessions last week, in the banking world we call it onboarding, and in your business, regardless of what business you're in, you can probably still refer to it as onboarding or customer welcome or however you want to call it. But it, it reinforced to the bankers, and it should reinforce to anybody listening to this webinar, The, the, the need for some sort of a formal process that can welcome new customers into your organization and make sure that you wrap their arms around them. We have talked at Free Webinar Wednesdays on the whole concept of marketing automation in the past, for example, and how a marketing automation service like a SharpSpring or a HubSpot or a Salesforce Marketing Cloud, something along those lines. Can be used to nurture and help technology-wise build a reputation with people that are interested in doing business with you. So somebody goes to your website, they fill out a form, they download a PDF, they get access to an infographic, something that you put on the web to lure them in to interact with you a little bit. An automation process will go through and it will collect their email, it'll send them a follow-up, might put them into a drip process where over the next several days you're feeding them information. An onboarding process is similar to that in the sense that it's all about communicating quickly and effectively and hopefully with some bit of automation, because at the end of the day, if left to us humans, we will either forget, we will go on vacation, we'll get sick and not be in the office, or laziness and apathy will kick in and we just won't do it. So some sort of an onboarding process is important to have for any business that's welcoming in new customers to make sure that they not only are first thanked for the business and the opportunity to take care and serve them, but secondly, you want to also paint the picture of how they could do more with you. In very few businesses, and I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head and I just can't, But very few businesses are a one-trick pony. You know, rarely will you be in a business where the only thing you can do is X, and once somebody does X with you, you can't do anything else more for them. Your revenue opportunity decreases or basically is limited. You can't grow that relationship. And even if you have limited services that you can offer. So, you know, I send out a note, um, and say, you know, dear Jeff, thank you for being a customer here at Free Webinar Wednesdays. We appreciate you, um, listening to us or being part of our webinar. Um, if there's not other stuff that we can offer you, there's also a good opportunity to think about referrals, recommendations, or even getting in the head of who that person is, why they choose to do business with you, And what other stuff could you give them that would at least paint the picture that you're a helpful resource? Drop some coins into that karma bucket so that down the road, if something happened to drop the ball and they decided, you know, they were in a point where they needed to make a decision of do they stick around or do they seek some other service and do they leave you? If you build that relationship early on, It's gonna give you the ability to retain that relationship and keep them longer. And I think there would be a hard-pressed argument against the logic of the longer a customer stays with you, the more money they're gonna spend with you, the more profitable that relationship is going to be. So in the banking world, you wanna make sure that if somebody came in and opened up a checking account, for example, something goes back to them that thanks them for the checking account, You quickly inform them of the different products and services that might complement that checking account and make their banking life easier, give them additional convenience, things like a debit card. Maybe you offer a special rewards program that they can earn cash back or points when they use their card at purchases, different security features that you may have associated with your online banking service. Maybe you've got a person-to-person payment service, very similar to a PayPal or even something like what we're gonna see here with Facebook and their Libra. Platform that allows your bank customers to easily pay money directly to somebody else through their checking account without having to write a check or pass on money. So you want to be very quick and to the point, not that you're just trying to hawk them a bunch of stuff that they don't necessarily need, but your goal in an onboarding process is to make an attempt to get them to engage with you at the maximum level possible so that they're going to have as many relationships as they're comfortable having with you. And then allow you to then move forward and serve them. And some of those customers are gonna go through that process and they're gonna bite hook, line, and sinker in the first 3, 5, 6 days. And they're gonna open the account, they're gonna get signed up for online banking, they're gonna use their debit cards, they're gonna set up bill pay, they're gonna do direct deposit from their employer, they're gonna do all of that. And maybe you don't need to nurture that relationship through an onboarding process for the next 30 to 60 days. Others might move a little bit more slowly. They might do the checking account, might take them a while to get their employer on board for direct deposit. They might want to wait and talk to their spouse to determine whether or not they want one or two debit cards. So you just need to have some sort of a process that understands the value of building and enhancing that relationship as it relates to the products and services that they have with you, and that process can work intelligently through knowing that I might be somebody that's done everything in the first 5 days, and I don't really need any more emails to remind me to do that 'cause I'm all in. Whereas somebody else might need— there's one of those coughs— somebody else might need a little bit more handholding. So, you know, a lot of other stuff that we talked about in those forums, but from a general, any business should benefit, I would encourage you to think about How you're welcoming new customers to your organization. Do they know all the products and services that you have to offer? And are you using those opportunities to refer other partners, other businesses, other services that might be complementary to what you do? And of course, if those businesses find that you're referring business to them, they very well may reciprocate the favor and they might start promoting your business. In their respective onboarding process. So now you can use that as a way to potentially open up that lead funnel from other businesses and, uh, and other, other avenues that may not have previously been considered. So hopefully that's, uh, an idea that you've, uh, I don't want to say not heard of because I think everybody has heard of onboarding at a certain point or to a certain extent, but But maybe me saying it out loud, you know, it's a lot of these podcasts and other books that I read. You know, there's not a lot of brand new ideas out there in the world. It's just individuals framing them in different contexts and talking about them so that it makes it top of mind. And then if you hear it over and over enough and somebody frames it in a way that just seems to make logical sense for you, that's when the light bulb goes off, the rubber meets the road, and you actually do something with it. So let me know in the chat if you are so inclined, if you've got an onboarding process that you put in place within your organization, or if this is something that you think would be of interest. I would certainly love to know that if you'd like to share. So a little bit of a banker bent here. We're talking about currency, the good old-fashioned American dollar. And we all know of the term cryptocurrency, most notably probably Bitcoin, Ethereum. There's a number of different cryptocurrencies out there. This is an article that came out on the 18th of June from our folks over at TechCrunch, and I would strongly encourage you to pop over and take a look at it. I don't know is if you Have ever played around with cryptocurrency? I know a lot of people. Bitcoin craze was up to, oh boy, probably close to $20,000 a coin. I think it's dropped down since then. I don't remember what it was the last time I checked, but the volatility and value of a cryptocurrency, which is really an alternative form of digital money—it's not regulated or protected by the federal government like the American dollar is. It's not insured. So if the money disappears and goes away, that. That's just the way that the ball bounces. Whereas if you put your money into a bank and that bank for whatever reason has a problem, you've got FDIC insurance that insures that money and you will get your money back. It's guaranteed and backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. So that's a good thing. So that's why a lot of people are somewhat leery about a cryptocurrency. The interesting and probably attractive part of a cryptocurrency on the other hand is to some people there's an era of anonymity. Unfortunately, Bitcoin is a lot of times associated with hackers, and if somebody has injected malware or done some sort of a lock where they've taken control of your website— or they've taken control of your computer, I mean— and they've maybe locked that information on your computer in a form of what's referred to as ransomware, you'll have to send them $3,000 in Bitcoin, which means you got to figure out how to get your $3,000 converted to X number of Bitcoins and then send those Bitcoins to the bad person, and they will in turn give you the hash, the password that will unencrypt all your information. You'll be able to get your information back. They do that through a Bitcoin cryptocurrency so you can't track down where the money goes, so the police can't show up at the door like if you were to mail them a check, and it's not trackable or traceable. So there's a little bit of kind of creepiness there, but the attractiveness of a cryptocurrency is it's a full digital payment solution. Makes it really easy because you have wallets on both sides of the transaction where you can send money back and forth. It's instantaneous. You don't have to wait for the banking system to process an ACH file or a wire transfer request. So there are some attractive components of a cryptocurrency in the ability to send money in a form of payment from one person to another, allowing for that value to be passed along without some of the, I guess, more traditional hurdles of sending a check or other sorts of maybe more typical banking functionality. So I'm interested, any of you that are, that are live, if this is a platform that you have heard about. They announced it. This has been out for probably a couple of weeks, but they are going to be taking this cryptocurrency and they're bringing in their own wallet, which is if you think of a regular wallet where you put your dollars and your credit cards, a digital wallet will be responsible for holding your cryptocurrency, and you'll be able to then use that wallet through some of their applications. And you can see they've mentioned specifically. There's that cough again. They mentioned specifically WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, so that if you're chatting with somebody, both of which are now fully encrypted end-to-end, so your conversations are not visible to Facebook or anybody else other than the 2 people that are participating, you'll be able to send your information directly to individuals through WhatsApp or Facebook, and that information can include payment, and that gives people the ability to send money. Not really launching this until first half of 2020, but more and more details are coming out. I will tell you, even in the banking space, I've not seen a lot of chatter about this. I think a lot of people are either not going to pay attention to it until it gets into 2020 because the first half is when they're launching it, or they've seen Bitcoin. Everybody was crazy about Bitcoin, and then it kind of fizzled and Now it's not really the topic of conversation any longer unless you're a hardcore Bitcoin trader and you're actually using it on a regular basis. So I think there's a lot of individuals that are waiting to see whether this is something that's actually going to flush out. But I think it's important whether this ends up being Libra or it breathes new life into a Bitcoin initiative, but I think it's pretty clear to say the way that we're paying people, even if it's not through their Libra cryptocurrency, you can still connect your own bank account to a lot of these platforms. And it might not be an instantaneous, anonymous, all-digital transaction, but you still have a way of sending money back and forth between people. It draws a correlation between the Libra currency and PayPal, which is probably one of the leading person-to-person payment systems. You know, we're in the process of actually selling a vehicle, and the individual that's interested in purchasing the vehicle wanted to get me a down payment deposit in order for me to hold the vehicle for him to get me the rest of the money after his paycheck came in after the 4th. I mentioned PayPal. All he needed was an email address. He said, I've never done that before. Admittedly, not a real technical individual. But by the time he returned back home after he stopped by, took the car for a test drive, the money was in my PayPal account and he was surprised at how easy that transaction was. All he needed was my email address. Setting up the actual PayPal account on his end was super simple. So the complexity of building and using a person-to-person payment solution is certainly being knocked down, and it's a whole lot easier for people to pay money to one another. So I'm not going to read this entire article. I think you can certainly do that yourself if this is something that's of interest to you. They've got a nice little video here that kind of walks through the process of how Libra and cryptocurrency in general kind of work. So if you've not really dug into any of this before, this might be An interesting time well spent just to kind of get an idea. You can see the ecosystem where it's got all these, you know, different organizations that are part. You've got some pretty big organizations in here, both Lyft and Uber from a ridesharing service perspective. You've got Visa and MasterCard. There's PayPal, Coinbase, which is one of the platforms that's typically used for cryptocurrency transactional capabilities. So I would just want to make sure that you are aware of this. Spend a little time, dig around, and then certainly would be interested in any thoughts or observations that you might have as to what this means for you as a consumer. If you happen to be a banker, what do you think this means for banking? Just kind of curious on that. The last thing that I wanted to chat about Again, no surprise, a little bit of a banking bent. Um, but we've been talking with institutions, smaller community institutions, who have started realizing that the digital world, the digital experience, the new age consumer that maybe isn't as concerned or interested in coming into a physical office all the time, although I still think the branch structure in the banking world has some value, especially when you have a really important question or something serious that you need help with. But a lot of smaller community banks are now starting to think about and having discussions at the board level about ways that they can create a digital version of their institution, a digital branch, a digital product offering. Some of those organizations are thinking that they will come up with a completely different name. They'll do a completely different brand, so it's totally different from the physical brick-and-mortar traditional bank. Others are embracing more of a, we're just evolving our organization. And whether you are part of a financial institution or more of a traditional business and wondering what the impact is on companies like Amazon and others, Offering maybe some of what you do as an electronic online available service, even if it's a physical product that gets delivered. Unlike the banking space where you're not really delivering physical products, even though you can touch cash, most of what a bank does is really service. It's not something that you can touch or feel. It's a mortgage service that allows you to buy a house. It's a car loan that allows you to get an automobile. It's a checking account. that you have access to, to be able to pay bills and shop and savings account for savings money. When you start thinking about the digital version versus the traditional version, it's important that you think of the audience that you're gonna be going after. So how do they differ from the customers that are currently doing business with you now? If you feel that you need to come up with some sort of a digital bent on that, business model that has been working for you for the last, I don't know, 100 years or whatever the case might be. Think about what that target audience, how they interact with you, what their expectation is. Do they want service 24/7, 365 through chat and, and online, online video conferencing? Or is it their product and service delivery they expect access without fees or charges. So make sure that you have a really clear understanding of what that target audience wants, not just what you think they want, because you may be stuck in your own industry and not really putting yourself in the shoes of that target customer. You might have to ask some folks, you might have to bring some of those in, but those are things that you're definitely going to want to pay attention to. The other thing that— and I've got Aspiration up here as an example, and there's a lot of others out there in the industry that you can also take a look at— but how are you differentiating your brand message to that target audience? And so this is an effort, and you can see, do well, do good. This is a financial service where you can get a debit card, provides banking services, and you can see their tagline is save the money, save the planet. They've got some sort of an affinity or a cause that they've aligned themselves with, and rather than differentiating themselves on having the most branches or having the friendliest staff, what they're doing is they're going after the customers that, in my opinion, are likely the younger customers that have a little bit more social consciousness and are concerned about things like the environment and eating healthy and going green, they're targeting their product and service to that market because the features that have been rolled into the debit card associated with the account all have some sort of a tie back into that do well, do good mentality. And so when you think about stacking up institutions and services that provide banking and debit card and payment capabilities, If everything that Aspiration offers is similar to what a traditional community institution offers, but they've got the example of, you know, this giving or their kind of focus or their mantra, there's going to be a certain customer demographic that's going to choose an Aspiration relationship because those extra things are differentiating factors for them. And I don't know if you've not been part of the banking space, you probably have never really even heard of Aspiration before. So this may be a site worth taking a look at, kind of kicking the idea around. But you can see this is one of their financial industry spends, lobbyist contributions, blah blah blah. 10% of their earnings are going to charities and helping Americans build a better life. That's a pretty important thing. So They don't fund any fossil fuels. They don't charge any ATM fees. They don't have any monthly fees. They're able to do that because their infrastructure is very lean and efficient and cost-effective. They don't have branches, expensive buildings with property tax and maintenance and utilities. They don't have staff in those branches. So they've eliminated expense and they've been able to pass that along to the customer. So think about that business model that you've embraced, and is it time for a refresh? Do you need to look outside of the box? Are there customers that are having their expectations set in other industries that are then showing up and wondering, you know, use Starbucks for an example. If I can get on my Starbucks app while I am, I'm gonna say a passenger in a vehicle, 'cause I certainly wouldn't suggest doing this while you're driving, But if I'm in Starbucks riding in a passenger— in a vehicle, and my wife's driving and we want to stop at Starbucks, I have the ability to go into my Starbucks app. I can find the nearest Starbucks that might be 5 or 6 miles down the road. I can enter my order for a grande mocha with coconut milk, no whip, and I can have that drink waiting for me when I pull up to the Starbucks. I get out of the car, it's paid for just like an Uber, so I, I process the payment directly through the Starbucks app, and I simply walk into the Starbucks store whether there's 1 person or 10 people in line, and I go over to the area to check at the pickup, and I just grab my coffee and I walk out. If, if I have that level of convenience for a cup of coffee, what does that do from an expectation perspective? If you think about your business, where are the bottlenecks? Where are the holdups? Where are the things that have always been the way that they've been? And so whether it's an aspiration-based approach and you've come up with a different cause and you're adding a different feeling and people that bank with you actually feel like they're making a difference in the world, which is Something that they maybe aren't getting from their current financial institution, or you're adding more convenience. Maybe going back to the beginning of what I started talking today about is the whole onboarding. So making sure that that message, that brand promise is being clearly described, and you remind your customers of that. But those are all things that I think are super important. There's so many options out there. There's so much. More competition today than there was in years past. And let's face it, there's really no signs that that's going to slow down at any point soon. In the banking space, you know, there used to be a handful of these digital-only banks that were out there. Now, you know, I don't know last count, but, you know, there's more and more entering the market every day. And I'm sure in your industry It's going to be something very similar to that where these are changing times in your industry. You're better off disrupting your own business model by thinking outside of the box and causing yourself to do something different than waiting for somebody else to come in and disrupt you. Because if that happens, you put yourself and your business at substantial risk for not just disruption but potential obsolescence. And if you're the one that comes in, yeah, it might create some uncomfortable moments for staff and employees that have been there a long time and always done what they've done. But if you don't take the responsibility for disrupting your business, somebody else is going to do that for you, and you may not like the results when you don't have control of that process. So those are my thoughts on this July 3rd, the day before The Independence holiday here in the United States of America. I wish all of you a very safe, um, and hopefully warm and sunny and, um, burger-filled. Uh, those of you that are vegans, uh, and vegetarians, my apologies. You can have yourself a bean burger. Um, but I hope you have a great holiday. I certainly appreciate you spending time with me. on today's webinar, and it's been great to be back in the saddle here at Free Webinar Wednesdays. We'll look forward to seeing you on a following episode here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, make it an awesome week, and, uh, we'll see you online. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.