Johannesburg, 10 Dec 2015
British banker Lawrence Childs introduced the first printed cheques in 1762, and for roughly the next two-and-a-half centuries, depositing one usually entailed a visit to your local branch. Then in 2010, a major financial institution became the first major US bank to let customers deposit cheques via their smartphones, setting off a mad scramble among financial institutions to create "remote deposit" apps of their own - immediately.
"The other banks realised that they quickly needed to have that capability," says Jay Lyman, research manager for cloud platforms at 451 Research, an analyst firm headquartered in New York. "They couldn't wait a year."
So it goes these days in the business world. Fuelled by cloud computing, mobility, real-time analytics, and social media, profitable new markets are appearing and evolving at an unprecedented clip; anyone who wishes to remain competitive has little choice but to keep pace.
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