In Part One of this three-part series, King examines how Amazon, Apple and Kindle helped light the consumer fire for electronic commerce.

There's a strong statistical argument to be made for disruptive technologies that change consumer behavior. I've argued the impact of this on branch banking extensively, starting with Branch Today, Gone Tomorrow and more recently in Chapter 3 of Bank 3.0, but I'm still faced with significant resistance in the retail banking industry at large. So I thought I'd share a statistical view of the triggers that result in the deconstruction of traditional distribution systems, and look at the evidence in the retail banking space.

Core Behavioral Shift

The argument at the core of anticipating widespread disruption to the physical distribution channel within retail banking is to examine changing behavior around the branch, and if there are any patterns we can learn from in other industries. In industries like music, books and video rental we see historically the same triggers and shifts, along with the same reluctance to accept the inevitable changes that this brings.