Basically, nothing is happening in UK banking

The British newspapers all reported on the latest figures for current account switching. Here’s an example: "Branch closures, IT meltdowns and vanishing cash machines have forced nearly a million disgruntled savers to ditch their bank and move to a rival in the past 12 months”. Wow. Nearly a million. That sounds like a lot.

But I wonder how many disgruntled customers did that last year? Not so wow. Nearly a million. So, basically, nothing has changed.

In fact the number of people switching accounts, while slightly up on last year, is 9% down on 2016. And the number of people switching is still a fifth down on 2012, the year before the banks were forced to introduce the Current Account Switching Service (CASS, a system which cost hundreds of millions of pounds) to reduce the average time to change bank accounts from around 10 days to a week.

Yes, that right. There are still fewer people switching accounts now than there were before the convenient and user-friendly account switching service was introduced.

Frankly, you can understand why no-one bothers switching. Every bank delivers basically the same service as every other bank, so the number of people switching accounts remains at around 3% of the customer base. And in a sector that is so heavily regulated, the cost of innovation is so high that only the most mass market of new products or services can get into production - it is very difficult to go down a more agile, design-led path.

The headline should have been “Despite everything that banks can throw at them, British bank customers resolutely refuse to move accounts”. This more accurate description of the retail banking landscape appeared, as far as I could tell, only in the Pink ‘Un. In a lovely piece titled “What would it take for you to switch your bank account”, Clear Barrett highlights the specific example of TSB and notes that despite the catastrophic failure of their system and weeks of chaos, only a tiny fraction of the customer base blew them off and switched! They had a net loss of only 6,000 customers (26,000 customers left but - astonishingly - 20,000 joined).

What about the “challengers” you say? Well, first of all, “challengers” is a bad name for what are essentially niche banks. Second of all, what about them? According to the FT, when data analytics company Ogury carried out a study of just over 1.5m mobile users in the UK in the second quarter of this year, it discovered that all of the top ten most-used ‘banking’ apps were from the traditional high-street banks.

So, no-one changes their current accounts (or their savings accounts, which the FCA says gives the big banks a cheap way to fund lending and stifles the “challengers”). But in the future, this inertia will be overcome.

How? Well, as the FT noted, and as I have repeated ad nauseam, “UK bank executives probably aren't losing too much sleep over fintechs just yet. More likely to have them reaching for the Zopiclone are the US tech giants moving into the payments sector who -- somewhat perversely -- could end up being the biggest beneficiaries of PSD2".

What does this mean for account switching? I think it could be very significant indeed. Open banking means that banking services will be delivered by these tech giants acting as “third party providers” (TPPs). The TPPs will manage the relationship with the customer and interact with the banks through application programming interfaces (APIs). The banks will be the heavily regulated, low margin, high volume machines sitting behind those APIs, and the will be selected because of service level agreements and cost/capacity calculations, not because of adverts of spacemen floating down beaches while singing.

The account switching will be done by bots rather than by those customers, disgruntled or not. When I decide to open my Amazon savings account, I’ll never bother to read the small print and find out that the account is actually provided by Barclays. And when Barclays try to charge Amazon a penny more, Amazon will move the account to Goldman Sachs. I haven’t switched my main bank account for 41 years, but I can imagine algorithms changing it for me every 41 days to get the best possible deal on financial services at all times.