Behavioral interviews

I have been using behavioral interviews for a while now while interviewing candidates. More than the technical skills which can be evaluated much easily, evaluating a person's capability to make decisions, do the right thing, act in complex business situations and deal with organizational complexities are more difficult. If you were to ask a person, what would you do in a certain situation, he or she would tell the answer what you want to hear. However with behavioral interviews, you are asking the person to talk about an example of a particular situation and then dive deep on analyzing how the person dealt with the situation.

This technique has been very useful to me in evaluating candidates as it not only tells how the person acted in a certain situation, the values and the methods used and whether the person has the required experience for the job s/he is interviewing.

Disruptive innovation

Disruptive innovations either create new markets or reshape existing markets by delivering relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to a set of customers who are ignored by industry leaders. Disruptive innovation brings in a new class of customers 'non consumers' or caters to 'overshot' customers who do not need performance, quality or product improvements that are focused by established companies - 'sustaining' innovations mainly serving the high margin customer base. Prof. Christensen has done an excellent job in defining this and also gives several examples - steel mills, disc drive industry, etc.

Recently I was thinking about this and analyzing how we at Mitek are disrupting the banking space. Until recently, consumers did not have a way except to drive up to the ATM to deposit a check or buy a office check scanner. We at Mitek have disrupted this by providing a more convenient way for this job to be done i.e deposit a check into the bank account. As soon as you get a check in the mail, just start your banking app on the smart phone, take a picture and click a button and your check is on its way to your account. It is so much better than holding on to the check, hoping to remember that you will take it with you next time you go out and finally stand in line at the teller or the ATM.

The banking space has rarely changed for a long time. The focus in the banking space has been on higher margin services. Mitek has brought in a disruption to the space by providing convenience. Chase was one of the first to adopt Mitek's technology and now most banks are on their way to implement this.

This is becoming ubiquitous with all banking apps and soon you will never have to go to the bank to deposit a check.

In my next blog, I will write about another disruptive technology I had worked on. Stay tuned.

Mobile Deposit - Bank of America

I am excited that Bank of America has launched the Mobile Deposit application for iPhone today. Great team work from Mitek to support Bank of America going live. I tried the application and the user experience is great, seamless and friendly. I like that the deposit is immediately reflected with status as Pending in your account statement. 

With BoA launching, we now have Chase, Citi, Wells (partially launched), BoA, PNC - all the top 5 banks providing the Mobile Deposit feature. Definitely gratifying to see our technology widely adopted and used. 

Additional good news is that, the deposit through Mobile limit seems to be $10000 which is pretty good. This means I can deposit my typical expense checks ( typically $3K) without having to go to the bank or ATM. There are some banks which have much lower limits but users are definitely requesting to increase the limits based on the reviews I have seen on app stores.

Go Mitek!! Go Mobile Deposit!!