The battle to win bank customers across Asia is not taking place on its high streets or even though its televisions and computer monitors – increasingly it is taking place in the palms of people’s hands. 在亚洲各地，银行争夺顾客的战场不是商业街，甚至也不是电视和电脑屏幕。人们的手掌心正渐渐成为银行争抢的焦点战场。
As the region’s economies grow, become more urban and more middle-class, many industries are skipping stages of technological development that took years – even decades – to pass through in the west. Some banks have woken up to the fact that their industry is not just skipping a bit of history but that the people who should be their customers are coming to financial services from an entirely different starting point. 随着亚洲经济增长、城市化提速和中产阶层崛起，很多行业正在跨过某些技术发展阶段，而西方历经数年乃至数十年才走完这些阶段。一些银行意识到，不但银行业在跨越历史，而且潜在顾客也在从完全不同的起点接触到金融服务。
According to Egidio Zarrella, a partner at KPMG China, the professional services firm, that country’s consumers and banks are leading the way. “They don’t have the legacy systems and practices to overcome,” he says. “They can skip the branch build-out and capture customers straight on to the state-of-the-art platforms.” 专业服务公司毕马威中国(KPMG China)的合伙人埃迪吉奥•扎雷拉(Egidio Zarrella)表示，中国的消费者和银行正在引领新潮流。“银行不需要克服什么旧有制度和惯例，”他表示，“它们可以跳过增建分行的阶段，通过最先进的平台直接吸引顾客。”
Mr Zarrella runs a survey every quarter in which his team downloads all the applications available for smartphones and tablets. “We see banks in China adopting everything from NFC (Near Field Communications) through to collaboration with major [telecommunications companies] for enhanced functionality,” he says. 扎雷拉每季度进行一次调查，在调查过程中，他的团队会下载所有的智能手机和平板电脑应用。他说：“我们发现，从引入近场通信(NFC)技术到与大型电信公司合作，中国的银行为了增强功能采用了多种措施。”
China alone already accounts for 40 per cent of mobile banking users worldwide, according to industry research by Celent, part of the Oliver Wyman consultancy. 奥纬咨询(Oliver Wyman)旗下Celent进行的行业研究显示，单是中国就已经占到全球移动银行用户总数的40%。
Aside from the brute numbers, Asia’s youthful demographics and rapid adoption of smartphones and other mobile technologies influence the character of the markets. “Asia is leading the way in mobile banking because consumer behaviour is leading the banks, but also because there is much more upside to making an investment [in consumer technology] where you have growth markets and lower branch numbers,” says Kenny Lam, a partner at McKinsey, the consultancy. 除了惊人的数字之外，亚洲年轻的人口格局以及智能手机等移动技术的迅速普及也影响了市场的特征。咨询公司麦肯锡(McKinsey)的合伙人肯尼•林(Kenny Lam)表示：“亚洲在移动银行业务上先行一步，一是因为消费者习惯在主导着银行，而是因为在一个市场增长快、分行数量少的地区，投资消费者技术能带来更多的好处。”
It is not just the youth of Asia but the growing wealth of users that is promoting investment, says Aman Narain, Standard Chartered’s Singapore-based global head of digital banking. “Wealth is different in Asia,” he says. “There are more millionaires in their 30s than anywhere else in the world. The way they made their money is different – it is mostly self-made and not inherited – and the way they want to access and use that money is different too.” 渣打银行(Standard Chartered)驻新加坡数字银行全球主管阿曼•纳拉因(Aman Narain)表示，推动投资的动力不仅是亚洲的年轻化，还有用户的财富增长。“亚洲的财富状况已经发生了变化，”他说，“亚洲30多岁的百万富翁数量高于世界其他任何地区。他们有着不同的生财之道——主要是靠自力更生而不是继承财富——因此他们花钱的方式也有所不同。”
For this reason, the apps available for wealthy clients of Asian banks are some of the snazziest around, says Mark James, technology specialist at Oliver Wyman in Asia. “One of the coolest apps I have seen was for the private banking market, where clients want to be able to explore various options trades and play with the data themselves,” he says. 奥纬咨询技术专家马克•詹姆斯(Mark James)表示，亚洲银行因此为这些富有顾客提供最为先进的应用程序。他说：“我所见过最时髦的应用是一款私人银行市场应用，顾客能够研究多种期权交易机会，并自己摆弄数据。”
For the wider market the key for banks, as in so many other sectors, is being able to collect and use data – on what consumers earn, what they owe, where and on what they spend their money. “Where there is a real arms race is on the customer analytics front, to deliver a service that is bespoke,” he says. “The predictive capabilities of Amazon around recommendations for books or music are the example to follow.” 在宏观市场层面，银行面临着与其他诸多领域相同的关键问题：如何收集和利用有关消费者收入、负债状况、消费地点和消费对象的数据。詹姆斯表示：“在顾客分析、提供定制服务的领域出现了一场真正的军备竞赛。亚马逊(Amazon)推荐书籍或音乐的预测功能是值得效仿的榜样。”
Being able to exploit this information requires having what Mr James calls “a single source of truth” – in other words, ensuring that everything a customer does with an institution can be seen in one place. 要想利用此类信息，需要拥有詹姆斯所说的“单一数据源”(single source of truth)——换言之，即保证可在一个位置观测到顾客通过一个商家进行的所有活动。
Jonathan Larsen, global head of retail banking for Citibank, another Asia-based executive, has been making exactly this sort of change – instituting a single IT system first across Asia and now in the US and other markets. The company hopes this will allow it to collect details about clients more easily, while making the customer experience of using a branch, an automated teller machine, an internet terminal or a mobile phone all as similar as possible. “We are moving from a traditional branch to a digitised and self-help model,” he says. “We can then operate off a much smaller footprint and focus the activities of our client outlets on customer acquisition.” 另一位驻亚洲高管、花旗银行(Citibank)全球零售银行业务主管罗中恒(Jonathan Larsen)正在做出这样的新尝试——先期已在全亚洲建立其统一的IT系统，目前正扩展至美国和其他市场。公司希望通过借此更轻松地收集顾客信息，并且尽可能地让分行服务、自动取款机、互联网终端或手机银行具有相似的顾客体验。“我们正在从传统的分行服务模式转变为数字化自助模式，”他表示，“这样就可以大大减少实体网点的数量，使网点的主要精力放在招徕顾客上。”
This could play a particularly important role in countries such as China, where it is hard to open branches. 此举在中国等不易开设分行的国家可能具有尤其重要的意义。
In any case, according to McKinsey, branches matter less. Across the region, the use of mobile and internet for banking overtook branch and telephone use for the first time last year, Mr Lam says. 麦肯锡认为，无论如何，分行的作用已经不那么重要。肯尼•林表示，去年亚洲的移动和网上银行使用率首次超过分行和电话银行。
But in China and Asia more broadly there are other elements at work too. In countries with high crime rates and low use of banks, telecoms companies have enjoyed huge success developing mobile payments services that mean people don’t have to carry cash. In the Philippines, Globe Telecom has been lauded by bodies such as the UN for GCash, a phone-based mobile payments service that lets people do everything from buying their morning coffee or paying their bills to sending or receiving money across international borders. The only thing it does not offer is credit. 但在中国乃至全亚洲，促成这一局面的还有其他因素。在一些犯罪率高、银行网点生意冷清的国家，电信公司开发出了使人们不必携带现金的移动支付服务，因此获得了巨大成功。在菲律宾，Globe Telecom推出了GCash手机支付服务，允许人们进行从购买早间咖啡、支付账单到收发国际汇款等各种操作，因此获得了联合国(UN)等机构的表扬。它唯一不提供的功能是贷款。
At the same time, technology companies are also involved in people’s financial lives from their very first steps. China Construction Bank, one of China’s biggest institutions, recently launched an ecommerce business to sell everything from shoes to smartphones. The point is not so much to exploit a new source of profits but to protect the old ones. The bank is fighting to keep its place “in the value chain”, an executive explained – battling to prevent the loss of consumer data and to maintain low but steady revenues from ordinary transactions that might otherwise be claimed by non-bank competitors such as Alibaba, the internet group that is also offering loans to small businesses. 与此同时，技术公司也在影响着人们身边的金融生活。中国最大银行之一中国建设银行(CCB)近期推出了电商业务，销售包括鞋类和智能手机在内的各类商品。这样做的目的，与其说是开发新的利润渠道，不如说是保护旧有利润渠道。一名高管解释道，建行是在努力维护自己“在价值链中”的地位——尽力失去对消费者数据的控制，从普通交易中获得不高但稳定的收入，防止这些收入流入阿里巴巴(Alibaba)等非银行竞争对手的腰包。阿里巴巴是一家互联网集团，同样为小企业提供贷款。
However, the lack of retail banking history in Asia, and the far smaller number of branches already in place compared with the west, means the introduction of mobile banking is what Juniper Research calls a transformational event. 然而，亚洲缺乏零售银行服务的历史，以及银行分行数量远远少于西方，使得移动银行的面世成为了Juniper Research所说的“转变全局的大事”。
In the west, mobile services are one more way that people can do their banking and different sections of society will adopt them or not at different speeds. In Asian markets, however, a mobile device might be the first – and often the only – way people can access banking services without having to walk for miles to a branch. 在西方，移动银行只是人们使用银行服务的另一种方式，使用移动银行的社会阶层与亚洲有所不同，接纳它的速度也不相同。但在亚洲市场，移动设备却可能是第一种（往往也是仅有的一种）不用跋涉数英里去网点也能享受到银行服务的方式。
However, Mr Narain says there is so far to go in Asia that there is more than enough room for all types of service. “Our competition in payments and financial services is not each other or the emerging players, our competition is cash,” he says. “The more financial activity that can be converted into digital currency, the bigger the pie for everyone.” 不过，纳拉因表示，亚洲还有很长的路要走，所有类型的服务均有极为充足的发展空间。“支付与金融服务方面的竞争不是互相之间的竞争，也不是与新兴对手的竞争，而是与现金的竞争，”他说，“能够通过数字货币实现的金融活动越多，每个人能分到的蛋糕就越大。”
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