The ‘Unbundling’ of Financial Services for a More Custom Experience

The bundling of products or services is an age-old sales strategy designed to, quite frankly, sell more stuff. For the consumer, this can be a great incentive when the bundles include things you want. Who doesn‘t want 3 things for a lower price than buying them separately? But these days, bundles feel more like a trap than a deal – a forced purchase of items you don‘t want just to get the items that you do want. And in a world driven by consumer expectation, this won‘t fly.

Look at what has happened in the cable industry. Legacy providers like Comcast and AT&T can‘t pivot their aging business model to meet consumer demands and continue to force customers to pay for bulky channel packages. This gap has created lucrative opportunities for agile disruptors like Hulu, Netflix, Roku and Sling, who offer choice and a better experience – no waiting on service people to run wires around your house, and no ugly black boxes cluttering your TV area.

Elon Musk said, “Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.” Just like the cable companies, a disruption is happening in payments and banking, where the technology discontinuity lies primarily with the legacy processors who lack the agility and flexibility to offer a more streamlined approach to providing financial services.

But thanks to modern technology where digitization is reducing costs and changing how products are delivered and consumed, a menu-style delivery of financial products and services is now possible. This allows financial institutions to pick, choose and pay for only the products and services they need to meet the evolving needs of their customers or members. And as needs change, new products can be added almost instantaneously via a platform. Waiting months on implementations, coding and roadmap updates to get new services is a thing of the past.

There is a time and place for bundling. When I order a sandwich at a deli, I can just ask for the “Italian” instead of rattling off 8 ingredients. Or when apartments include cable, water and electricity in the rent – it’s nice to pay one entity instead of 4. But to stay competitive, modern and relevant financial institutions need to streamline their offerings to match the expectations of today’s consumers – and push it out in a way that is ridiculously fast and crazy convenient to consume.

Learn about i2c’s menu-driven payment platform.