Small Business Banking Customers are Different

Every road warrior struggles with expense reports but those of us in the consulting world have to serve up expense reports to multiple masters. Tracking can be a nightmare when one multi-client trip blurs into another and receipts are tucked in various places – or if you’re very organized, captured to an electronic device.

Recognizing the plight of the business traveler, Chase’s Jot app provides the ability to tag expense transactions via a mobile interface at the point of sale, and with its most recent upgrade also enables the customer to take a photo of the receipt and attach it to the transaction. Speaking as a business traveler who HATES expense reports, it is a huge convenience for the customer.

Last week I posted about a Cisco study claiming that 56% of respondents would be willing to provide more personal information to their banks in order to simplify the management of their finances. I said that the research did not provide quantitative evidence to back up that claim and that it was not intuitive that consumers would want to share more information given the “state of trust” in the financial industry.

Does uploading receipts and tagging transactions count as sharing more personal information for a simpler financial experience? Maybe. That depends on whether Chase is using that information in any manner beyond servicing the immediate need of the customer like using it to cross-sell products or promote third-party offers. Given the threshold of pain for expense reports I guess I’m willing to let them know whether or not my hotel nights are business travel and whether I drank all that wine myself or was taking a client to dinner.

Based on my non-quantitative sampling of an audience of one, I would suggest that business customers pop the intuitiveness bubble on information sharing. If a banking app saves us time, sign us up.