I sleep better when the world makes sense. 

Despite its Lean techniques, Toyota, a customer-driven business icon, is struggling.  It makes no sense.  In my attempt to understand their sudden woes, I somehow found my way back to consumer banking and was struck by what I found when I connected seemingly disparate parts of the business environment together—the massive Toyota manufacturing defect and the bank crisis, starting with subprime.   What role does a passion for the customer play in defects of the risk, profit, and accelerator pedal varieties?

How Customer Centricity Killed the Economy, will be the title of the book that I someday write but for now, I am satisfied just to understand the role that a relentless pursuit of serving customer needs played in getting us to where we are today in consumer banking.   Customers hated the onerous process of getting a mortgage and data suggested that risks were low enough to accept fewer, if any, pieces of paper so enter low-doc mortgage.  Customers wanted to buy better homes or get into their first home faster and home values were climbing so enter pay-option arm.  We were all happy until the floor fell out from under us.

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You are probably thinking, “Not those words again!”  Rest assured that I mean them differently.  In our case, credit is truly mutual, credit to the membership for pushing the Board to figure out a way to reach more of you more often and credit to the Board for quickly responding. Welcome to our Blog.

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You know the saying that timing is everything. In the case of blogs and CFC, this is very true. The past 18 months have delivered more change in banking than most of us can ever remember. We have examined these changes and their implications in our regular research, but the pace of change demands that even a research team leverages the means available to communicate better and more often. Welcome to our Blog.

For those of you whom I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Sharon Chinn and I am the head of research for the Council on Financial Competition (CFC). More importantly, as I close out the 20th year of my professional life (eek), I still fondly reflect on my prior roles in banking as a teller, a branch manager, a retirement plan provider, and a strategic planner. Today, it is my privilege to work with you as we face the most serious challenges the industry has ever seen.

As many of you are on the hook for improving transparency, we will do the same for you. It is my hope that through this blog the Council can share its work, ideas, and needs with you on a regular basis. This way, you will know what we are thinking about and working on as often as you would like. And, you should feel free to comment about it. Your feedback makes our work better.

Over the next several weeks, you will meet our team through our blogs. Let me take a minute to give them each of them a quick (and very informal) introduction. Derek Frost is our resident doctor of consumer banking. Michelle Sato has authored much of the CFC work for the past several years.  Anne Walbridge is our small business guru and a Twitter enthusiast. Kiara Domingo has hosted customer focus groups and is an integral part of our branch sales work.

We look forward to being in touch more often and in a less formal way. Talk to you soon.