The Bankwatch

I used the title mainly to get attention. The sub message was that its not sustainable for Banks to continue with online Banking as a simple automation of services application. They must address the social aspect, and learn how to work with that environment. I used examples of;

- Verity CU
- Wells Fargo
- Vancity
- UFirst CU

As examples of bank disrupters, I focussed on Wesabe, Prosper, Zopa, FYGO, and CircleLending.

Actual deck attached here. Can Bankers can be Bloggers too – LIFT 07

PDF version: bankers-can-be-bloggers-too-final-1.pdf

LIFT 07 speakers notes

Every Banks should listen to Lee. His basic premise; there is wasted brainpower in large corporations. Its turning people into idiots.

Some notes;
- IT syhstems don’t understand how people work.
- people work and think in terms of pattern matching
- organisations work linearly with tools like Outlook and sharepoint. – his example – you are in Africa; you see a lion – do you review a database for matching items, yellow blogn sharp teeth, large mane – no you run like hell. That’s because of instant pattern matching.
- IT worries about 70% of costs going to storage
- why don’t IT worry about collective intelligence?
- social tools emerging for productivity; blogs, wiki’s, tagging, subscription, aggregation
- read 100, tag 10, blog post 1 – this is a basic process of social reading writing, and filtering
- encourages orgs to seek collective intel
- large orgs have sufficient scale to gain network effect
- let’s org members get relevant info – info finds the individual

Finally, his suggestions;
- feeds for everything
- feed library management
- simple filtering tools
- tools to share collections, tags
- social search & attention data
- start small – pilots

Relevance to Bankwatch:
Individuals understand Internet, yet Banks don’t appear to. The tools and approach Lee speaks of will engage, educate, and provide new contexts for Banks’ that will move them forward in ways they cannot accomplish, with todays strategy development methods.

Laurent Haug is opening the first main conference day.

550 attendees from 30 countries.

1st Speaker; Florence Devouard, Cahirman of the Board, Wikimedia Foundation.

- 727 Million internet users in the world
- Wikipedia is 6th with 155 M. Top 5 are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, ebay, and Time.

Principles;
- collect local, collect global.
- Manipulate huge amounts of data
- Reactivity

Florence sees 4 global trends;
- virtually unlimited space
- nurturing a critical mind
- empowering people
- A priori trust – opening the gates rather than closing them.

That last point is harder fro Europeans.

2007 – 6 M articles in 250 languages. 600 servers by summer, and $5 M budget. Average donation – $20.

Finally vandalism not so much a problem. Larger issues are small date changes, politicians and individuals self promoting. Lacking content from Africa, and Asia. China blocks Wikipedia.

Day 1 was a workshop day. I participated in one facilitated by Dave Cockbane, a Prof from Stanford, and Nicolas Nova. Subject was “Designing the Future Cities”.

It was quite fascinating, and I learned some new tools for thinking through really hard, new problems, and I can use on this blog.

Themes that came out in the workshop regarding future cities;

- Population Density
- Virtual reality
- Integration of virtual and real in peoples lives
- Population aging
- Population Diversity
- Co-working
- Virtual ownership/ renting everything
- Fee based lifestyle

Highly thought proving day. The evolution of second life to compensate for otherwise gaps in personal lives was especially interesting.