Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Standard Chartered Breeze – iPhone App For Mobile Banking

I was invited to check out the launch of Standard Chartered Breeze, their new iPhone app that allows you to do mobile banking on the go. As I’ve mentioned previously on the blog, while I do bring some curiosity about the product offering to these events, more importantly I like to check out how the organisation has embraced digital (or not) and if they are embracing social (or not). I’m pretty happy to say they did both pretty well.

Digital
The Breeze iPhone app is well, a mobile banking iPhone app. The basic stuff is all there plus a few cool features added in for good measure. The first I really liked was the ability to make out a cheque right from the app (it even looks like a cheque), send it from your iPhone and the bank will process and post it on your behalf, at no charge. The second was the overlay of promotions on the Google Maps locator.

While perhaps the functions themselves are not exactly “revolutionary”, but I think this shows an approach to digital that is rare among organisations. Too often “digital” means “let’s just make the app do what they can already do online” but these go beyond that to figure out how digital can help you do what you already do (such as writing cheques and receiving credit card promotions in the mail), and make it even easier.

Social
The second thing is about “social”. Too often “social” means “let’s get a Twitter account” but there’s no interaction beyond that. From the minute I took a seat not one but two of the Standard Chartered folk came over to say hi, but not only that, but they had obviously done their homework and were able to bring up my previous post on bad Twitter metrics and have a short discussion about it. Now that’s interaction.

I wasn’t the only one, as I listened to other conversations they went from the iPad to living in Singapore to recent travel destinations, and very little conversation outside the presentation itself, was about Breeze. Heck Jimmy, from iMerlion had some problem with his account and Aman (group head) was personally listening and taking down notes and promising to get back to him. I think you can tell when organisation employees trudge down to an event to “show face” and want to get out of there as soon as possible and not mingle with the “blogger rabble”, but there was none of that here.

I didn’t write much about the actual app but you can read more about it at the Breeze microsite or Jason’s blog. I would like to hear how you’ve been treated at blogger outreach programmes and if there was a real effort to use social to enhance online and offline interactions, or if it’s something that was done for the sake of doing.

Tags: app, blogger rabble, cheque, digital media, embracing digital, google maps, imerlion, iphone app, jason.sg, mobile banking, mobile banking app, social media, standard chartered, standard chartered breeze, twitter