The BAI Retail Delivery conference is just coming to a close, and I attended along with the my colleagues in the Celent banking team. Attendance definitely appeared to be up over last year. The 2009 event was depressing from an attendance perspective, and I was happy to see the ramp up. The Las Vegas venue is certainly a draw, but based on conversations, there also seems to be more flexibility over last year with regards to travel budgets. With that said, the keynote sessions had tons of empty seats, indicating that either the "Vegas effect" is in play, and/or that there is still plenty of room for attendance to grow. I spent most of my time at the event in productive meetings with clients and prospects. I gathered a ton of information for research. A few key trends emerged from the conference, none of them are all that surprising. They do however point to what folks are thinking about and prioritizing for 2011.

• Alternative revenue sources. There is lots of scrambling going on given regulatory shifts and the need to grow revenues in the retail banking sector. Many of my discussions were about how banks can grow using the online and mobile channels. There were lots of questions regarding merchant funded rewards and how they can be integrated into online banking using vendors like Cardlytics or BillShrink.
• Analytics. This is a subject that everyone always seems to be talking about but isn't doing all that much with. Banks are sitting on tons of data, sitting being the key word. A number of discussions centered around how to leverage this data to build more complete customer views and cross-sell other products.
• Online banking platform upgrades and PFM. This is now trickling down to the retail front, following a ton of activity in the corporate banking space. Banks are realizing that their online banking offerings are stale, and don't provide the experience that customers are looking for. This will be a slow moving boat, but the exploration phase has certainly started. Much of this is being fueled by interest in PFM and the desire to integrate it with online banking.
• Mobile initiatives. Mobile is still a raging topic and was the focus of many discussions. A few key questions came up. Are mobile devices replacing the PC? What role do tablets play? Both these questions were also tied to the biggest dilemma - should I prioritize investment in the mobile channel, online channel, or both? My colleague Red Gillen will address these questions in more detail in a blog entry next week.

A couple of things surprised me:

• Lack of emphasis on social media. This has been a huge topic lately, and I found that the conference had little emphasis on this. Yes, the founder of Twitter was a keynote speaker, and there were other sessions on this topic, but I didn't find that banks at the event had that many questions here. Many banks are still clueless when it comes to social media. I actually had one banker tell me that he doesn't believe that social media will affect his customers. There is obviously a lot of learning for banks to do here in order to grow into the shifts that have already taken place in the online world.
• Limited concerns and discussions about online banking security and threats. All kinds of fraud has hit the business banking sector this past year. There is a lot that banks can learn from this, and additional safeguards need to be put into place for consumers.

For some further reading, Jim Bruene at NetBanker has compiled his Best of BAI Retail Delivery 2010.

I welcome all comments and thoughts. I also encourage those of you who were in attendance to share your experiences.