Referring to my wrap up of Finovate 2009, Matthias told me he wanted to prove bankers wrong and demonstrate Financial Services companies could be fun and have real fans such as Apple or Amazon. Bring it on Matthias, the industry needs new and fresh approaches to banking such as Ficoba, Mint, UBank or SmartyPig!
I look forward to catching up with him next month in Zurich at SOMESSO, "Corporate Social Media in the Finance Sector", where we are both speaking.
I recommended Matthias who I believe will be a perfect fit with his vision and his presentation skills.
Interview with Matthias (March 2009)
About iBrokr.com Last week Matthias contacted me to make me aware of their new service, iBrokr.com. Please find below more info Matthias sent me over earlier today:
"As mentioned in my email from last week, this is a platform, that: - combines the behavioural patterns of stock trading with "thrill" and "fun" - enables users to participate at the stock exchanges with a minimum investment of 1 euro… (that is real micro banking) - allows you to "just do it with toy money" on www.brokr.de - minimum transaction fees - no admin hurdle, easy registration - internationaly scalelable - no back office admin (therefor, this is not to replace a traditional broker) - high educational standard (e. g. limited investments for untrained users etc.) - sometimes high risk, but also high return - no investment-banking-black box in the products and applications, therefor very transparent.
A combination of FUN and BROKERAGE."
Small Private Beta Test They started their Private Beta and invited just 30 people to contribute. I just had a quick call with Matthias who told me that I was the only blogger to be invited to share his feedback at that stage. Das ist Wunderbar!
I can't tell you much more info at that stage, but the service is currently divided into three main sections: 1x2 Financials, Best Performer, and Easytrader.
Please find below some of the first screenshots (please note that the interface may still changed following the comments gathered during the Private Beta Test) Stay tuned on Visible Banking for an update later this year!
Please note that later today Matthias will give a presentation at the exclusive Techcrunch Munich event. The title: “With traditional banking dying, and community banking up, what does this mean for the startup economy”. Congrats Matthias!
Last week has been an important week for SmartHippo.com the first-ever website that uses the power of community to help consumers find the best mortgage rates and save money launched its beta version back in September 2007. Not only they introduced their new CEO Lori Collins, who was one of SH's founding Advisory Board members as well as the former GM at LendingTree, but they also announced the launch of HipoListo.es, their new Joint-Venture with Financialred in Spain.
"The web finance space is in its infancy in Spain and we believe we have an
opportunity to rapidly establish HipoListo as the dominant player in a market of
50 million consumers" said Jesus Perez, Chief Strategy Officer of FinancialRed.
"By leveraging the SmartHippo platform we were able to significantly reduce our
time to market."
I believe the HipoListo Team hans't started blogging yet. It is interesting to see two different approaches to Social Media and Advocacy which in Spain reflects the local market adoption of twitter: SmartHippo is focused on twitter, whereas HipoListo is focused on Facebook.
It is a Small Small World I love the Social Media / Online Inovation space in the Financial
Services industry. It is such a small world. I met George through Jim,
I first got in touch with Jesus when he was working at BBVA and I was Senior Innovation Manager at
Lloyds TSB, and while I was in NYC three weeks ago to cover Finovate 2009, I met with one of Jesus' colleagues, José Ruiz Cristina - Chief Strategy Officer at Financialred and Avi Karnani the Co-Founder of
Thrive and now VP Strategic Innovation at LendingTree, Lori's former employer. I LOVE my
job!
SmartHippo is not the only innovative startup in online finance which recently launched outside the US: in the last 12 months Wesabe partnered with the Telegraph in the UK and SmartyPig partnered with ANZ in Australia.
I have always been reluctant to use Facebook for a business purpose. Mainly because I was concerned with the concept of "friends" and the limited privacy options. But I must admit that it is a great tool to keep in touch with people, from close friends to business contacts, and I am sure that at least 90 million of people would agree with me.
And at the end of the day, you decide what you want to share on your profile. Be smart!
Provide some exclusive content & give more exposure to my fans When I decided to create a page for Visible Banking, I had a goal, a purpose: I want to demonstrate what you should do on Facebook. I saw too many companies "on Facebook" or claiming to be on Facebook. Again, like any other social media project, what is your goal? Does it make sens? And if you do it, do it right or at least try your best, connect with people.
Another issue on Facebook is "the brand ownership" or the alteration/dilution of your brand. Anybody can create a page, a product, or a service using your company name. Mark, could you ask one of your colleagues to comment this post and tell us how you plan to address this issue?
I don't want the Visible Banking Page to be a mere copy and paste of Visible-Banking.com..
As far as I am concerned, there is no point creating and maintaining your own page if nobody but you contribute!
My goals: Reward my Fans & Create some Buzz I was touched that after less than 48h, and just a few invitations sent, 12 people became fans of my page. For the soft launch of the page, I contacted a small group of people made of fellow bankers, industry experts and prominent bloggers.
I believe the success of any Social Media initiative is linked with your ability to engage with your community and urge them to contribute. It is critical to REWARD your members, your fans. Rewarding could mean many things such as producing exclusive content, or giving visibiliy / exposure to your contributors. I intend to do both on the Visible Banking Page.
Please find below the names and a short description of my first 10 "Founding Fans" sorted by chronological order: 1.Chris Skinner, Owner at Balatro (UK): Chris is one of the most famous "banking technologists" in the uk. Chris is extremely well connected, respected and disruptive. I invite you to check the Facebook Group he created to market its successful Financial Services Club. Chris is an active blogger on several websites such as finextra and swfitcommunity. I invite you to check my video interview with him.
4.Allese Thomson, Marketing Coordinator at Wesabe (USA): Allese works with Debbie and Gabe in the dynamic Marketing team at Wesabe. Allese has a lot of excellent ideas, and I am confident she will be instrumental in the next (expected) redesign of Wesabe's interface. I am so pleased she started blogging too. Congrats!
5.Morriss Partee, Chief Experience Officer at EverythingCU.com (USA): Morriss contacted me almost a year ago, after watching the video I shot with William Azaroff. Morriss created one of the most active forums for the exchange of ideas in the Credit Union arena.
Posted items I will use this application to flag the most interesting news in the online finance space. This will be exclusive to the Facebook Page. Bloggers, please do not hesitate to add a link to your posts related to the topics I cover on Visible-Banking.com.
Reviews I would really appreciate if you could spend two or three minutes to leave a comment/review about the page. The idea is to explain how useful the Visible Banking Page is for you.
Please note that I am not expecting a Linkedin like type of endorsement. Endorsements are more than welcome though: please visit my Linkedin profile.
Discussion Board Most of the Facebook pages I visited which have a discussion board hardly have any activities from the readers/fans. I don't want to start dozens of discussions if nobody participates. I would rather keep the list of topics short, and see some regular activity. Please express yourself! And if you fee like starting a discussion on the page, please follow up and invite any of your contacts which may want to participate.
Tim (Tim Collins, SVP Experential Marketing at Wells Fargo), what a pleasure to have you as first contributor. It demonstrates again your proactivity, your understanding of Social Media, and it means a lot to me. Thanks.
Notes I plan to use the Notes application to add the rss feed to my blog. I have a question for the Facebook Team: would it be possible to use a rss feed from the Page wall or the Posted items application. For the moment, I believe the Notes application is the only application which offers you to subscribe to its feed... Am I correct?
Events I would like to flag all the most valuable and innovative online finance events worldwide. I won't succeed all by myself, your help will be precious. I am particularly interested in your contributions in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.
Please flag any events, register your interest, share your comments, or capture the questions you would like to ask to the speakers or the exhibitors. Moreover, If you know anyone interested to attend, sponsor, participate or cover the events, please direct them to the page!
Videos For a start, I uploaded a sample of my best videos. In the future, I plan to upload some exclusive videos.
Please share any video of innovative online services, any interviews with an entrepreneur or a banker who is a champion for social media. I would like to make a statement witht this page: "You want to find out more about social media in banking, check Visible-Banking.com and the Visible Banking Page on Facebook".
Photos Same idea. I really urge you to add any pictures related to web 2.0, social media in banking, and online finance. Bankers: add a logo / some screenshots of your PFM tool or any of your innovative online services. Entrepreneurs: add a logo of your company.
Bank of Ireland (BoI) has added a range of new functions to its
Internet banking service, 365 Online, following a EUR10 million
investment in the site.
Please find below the new features BoI added to 365online.com: * Register new beneficiaries for domestic and international payments * Make international payments to over 40 countries worldwide * Top up mobile phones * Set up, cancel and amend standing orders
I believe the international payments feature is going to be very popular.
In his press coverage Brendan Nevin, Director Strategy & Marketing, says that the main reason that customers don't use internet banking is because they think it is too complicated to use. I believe Online Security is at least as important if not more important.
And even though I welcome the fact that BoI launched two tutorials in Chinese and Polish, I doubt this will have a big impact and dramatically increase online banking usage. Unless BoI heavily market that new "feature" in branches, by direct mail and online. Providing two new interfaces in Chinese and Polish would probably be more efficient.
An industry goal: drive more customers online This initiative demonstrates how important it is for banks to urge their customer to go online and switch to the cost effective Internet Channel. Banks are prepared to spend big budgets: the more people register and use the service, the less traffic to call centers or branches. Moreover, you will drive online sales thanks to targeted advertising, shorter application processes with pre-populated forms, and better conversion rates.
Most banks in the uk are busy working on the next generation of their online banking service. Currently, most current online banking services are based on old legacy systems, rigid and not content managed. It is complicated to make any changes within the secure website. Even minor changes (like updating some static text) must be prioritized and can take up to 6, 9 or 12 months to be completed.
The leading banks are usually more ambitious and they are working on projects to make the online banking service "more web 2.0", more user centric and more interactive. Their goal is to blur the line between the public website and the secure website. Their goal is to have a flexible, content managed, platform which the customer experience, the marketing, or the sales teams can modify quickly and easily.
I believe working on the next generation of online banking is also the perfect oppotunity to provide new services requested by clients such as being able to make international payments online, change your contact details, set up the level of security on your account, or have access to better personal finance management features.
As you know, I am always very enthusiastic when a bank launches an innovative service leveraging web 2.0 features such as blogging or social networking.
In the last couple of months, I discovered and reviewed many web 2.0 initiatives such as: * Join2Grow - Fortis initiative in the social networking space (I invite you to check my interview of Catherine Ossemerct, Head of Media-Channels) * pickuradvisor - ING innovative blogging platform launched first in India then in Hong-Kong * wtfcollective.com - Today, I met with the Head of Brand at Barclaycard to talk about the blogging/social networking site they recently launched to support their new onepulse card in London. I have scheduled with him a video interview next week.
BoA launches an online community for SMB to Learn, Connect & Share In that case, BoA's goal is to create a trusted online community for SMB. It is an excellent way to try a new, and fairly inexpensive, communication channel with their key market. Moreover, it will produce great learnings for their Experiential Marketing team.
So first of all, my congratulations to Mark Hogan, President of small business banking for Bank of America, and to his team for this excellent initiative. Mark, I am very keen to get in touch with you. I would like to interview you or someone from your team asap and find out more about your initiative in the online community space.
UGC: a potential threat, but what a great opportunity for banks Usually, User Generated Content is perceived more as a high risk
(brand damage) than a great opportunity. Indeed if you do it right, you can not only win back angry customers but occasionally you will even turn them into your best brand ambassadors.
In the web 2.0 era, your client expectations have changed: they won't hesitate to express themselves online, and they want you to show that you listen to them and prove that you care. You need to respond to them.
Even very negative comments are useful as
long as you respond and explain the reasons behind your (unpopular) decisions. You may even have to admit your mistakes. People will understand. Honesty pays. You will create trusted, stronger, relationships with your clients. Please check my interview with Fergus Hampton, CEO of Millward Brown Precis.
My initial comments Today (10th October 2007), I have spent an hour on the small business online community platform. Please find below my initial comments.
This initiative sits in the social networking space. It is a good platform, BoA successfully leveraged Web 2.0
features (like blogging, tagging and rss feeds) Overall, the interface is intuitive and it has a lot to offer. There seems to be a lot of activity on the site which counts several active members. And it feels like you
are part of a community.
Can't you build your own network and contact directly other members? But in this first release even if as a registered member you can post, comment or review articles and find other members, it looks like you can't really create a network of contacts nor directly contact the other members via the platform.
For instance, I couldn't find any security settings which would let me display my details on my profile. As an anecdote, I found the profile of another banker who found a way round that limitation: instead of his website he put his email address "http://johnDoe@hotmail.com". Clever. It shows that many members surely want to contact or be contacted by other members.
The goal is to create trusted business relationships, isn't it? It is one of the 3 pillars of the community: Connect, learn and share.
Good example of member engagement: reward your most active contributors Recruiting new members is not too difficult but engaging them, urging them to visit the site and contribute on regular basis is by experience more complicated. It is more complicated, AND it is critical. You need good UGC on your platform to sustain the growth and the quality of your member base.
To be successful, you need to reward your most active members. Members are giving away some of their spare time because they are seeking new opportunities. Give them more visibility!
On the UGC side, BoA do a good job engaging their members. They used good and proven features like questions/answers (Yahoo! Answers or Linkedin Answers, an excellent way to drive regular traffic and motivate/reward your members giving them more visibility)
a few facts and figures On Wednesday 10th October 07 at 21:30 GMT, it looked like: * 20 members were online * they have over 1080 registered members * they have over 150 threads on their forums, over 20 expert articles, over 15 Success Stories * the first profile was created on 19th July 07.
LPO / Conversion rate: the BoA logo links to their SMB Homepage. A splash page may help A discret but visible "powered by Bank of America" is displayed at the top of the screen.
By the way, in terms of branding and presence on their social networking site BoA, Fortis/Join2Grow, HSBC/yourpointofview.com and Barclaycard/wtfcollective.com have adopted very different approaches.
I like BoA's approach. The logo is present to remind you who provides this useful service, and I don't find it intrusive.
I would just challenge the link to the BoA SMB's homepage. I would be curious to find out about the journey from a community member who land on the SMB homepage. I suspect that people could easily get lost and that the conversion rate is probably low. Especially with a small number of registered members (and an even smaller number of active members).
I would probably test a splash page with for instance a few words on the online community, and maybe an option to know more about a specific product, chat online or be contacted by an advisor.
In the next couple of days, I will share with you more specific comments on the interface.
Today I have received an email from Ed Terpening, VP Social Media at Wells Fargo, to let me know that Wells Fargo are launching "Be Center Stage in the Rose Parade", their first Consumer-Generated marketing campaign.
Wells Fargo innovate again: they are the first large
financial institution to join that type of contest. I have already expressed my admiration for Wells Fargo (cf my post Wells Fargo 2.0), but again well done to Ed and his team!
Buzz and WOM Tim Collins, SVP Experiential Marketing at Wells Fargo, and his teams are not only good at launching innovative services or marketing campaigns, but they also know how to generate buzz online.
Earlier today, Ed contacted the key bloggers in the industry: I invite you to check the posts from William Azaroff, Jim Bruene (I look forward to meeting Jim at Finovate 2007 in NYC next week) and Colin Henderson(just to name a few)
If you are not familiar with the trendy Personal Finance space, Wesabe is its most innovative and high profile startup.
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article on Personal Finance: Personal finance: the internet banking 2.0 killer app? I haven't changed my mind, and I still believe Wesabe is one of the best examples of web 2.0, "social networking"/online community and user generated content.
I agree with my colleague, and fellow blogger, James Gardner who said in his excellent post A challenge to Wesabe that he was impressed with the way Wesabe innovate and communicate: "Wesabe are marvellous at letting everyone know when they are doing something new, so hat-tip to them".
I am passionate about online visibility, buzz marketing and word-and-mouth. I would like to congratulate Debbie Pfeifer for her enthusiasm, her videos and her emails. Debbie, thanks for contacting me prior every new press release!
New features Wesabe recently launched a couple of innovative features: * a REST API that allows anyone to get their bank or credit card data in XML, Excel, CSV, or a bunch of standard financial formats. * an OPEN SOURCE FIREFOX EXTENSION that allows anyone to automatically extract data from their bank every night, and upload it to Wesabe, regardless of whether their bank provides automatic download or not. * IMAGE CAPTURE that allows anyone to easily capture screen images of ecommerce transactions and file them for later reference
Firefox Uploader: Introduction Screencast Excellent screencast Debbie. You posted it on YouTube two days ago (24 July 07), and 2,589 people watched it already.
On regular basis (ideally weekly), I will post a list of key news on web 2.0 & Banking. As usual, please do not hesitate to get back to me with you remarks, or with any article I missed!
On regular basis (ideally weekly), I will post a list of key news on web 2.0 & Banking. As usual, please do not hesitate to get back to me with you remarks, or with any article I missed!
On regular basis (ideally weekly), I will post a list of key news on web 2.0 & Banking. As usual, please do not hesitate to get back to me with you remarks, or with any article I missed!
“Christophe is extremely well informed about the banking and financial services industries. He's at all the right conferences, and digs deep with his interviews of all the influencers and innovators. He's also a tremendously nice guy :-)” Aaron Patzer, Founder & CEO at Mint Software
“Christophe seems to have his finger on the pulse of the financial services industry. Visible Banking has become "the" source of information for innovations in the financial services industry.” Tim Collins, SVP-Experiential Marketing at Wells Fargo
I invite you to check today's 
A couple of hours ago, I found out on finextra the recent announcement from Bank of America: 
A discret but visible "powered by Bank of America" is displayed at the top of the screen.
If you are not familiar with the trendy 
Visible Banking News #7
On regular basis (ideally weekly), I will post a list of key news on web 2.0 & Banking.
As usual, please do not hesitate to get back to me with you remarks, or with any article I missed!
NEWS - 21 May 2007 to 27 May 2007
BLOGGING
* Wordpress grows beyond 1 million blogs - 24 May 2007
* New CU Blogs: Midwest Financial, Old Hickory, and Secure One Credit Unions - 21 May 2007
CUSTOMER COMMENTS
* Online banks hardly stuff of sword-and-sandals epic - 24 May 2007
* Making the Switch to Unadulterated Online Banking - 24 May 2007
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
* Wells' Web makeover woos punters and analysts - 25 May 2007
* Abbey in bank holiday meltdown - 25 May 2007
EVENTS
* Next MobileMonday Austin event: Mobile Banking and Payments, June 11 '07 - 26 May 2007
FRAUD
* A decade of online banking - and online fraud - 25 May 2007
* Anti-phishing filters bypassed in IE7? - 25 May 2007
* A first in Quebec's banking industry - Laurentian Bank innovates: 2 additional security barriers for online transactions - 24 May 2007
* Credit cards are still very vulnerable online - 24 May 2007
* Transaction hijacking - cheaper alternatives, at point of purchase - 24 May 2007
* Target 5 Warns Of 'Online Insecurity' - 24 May 2007
* House Passes Anti-Spyware Legislation - 23 May 2007
* Cyber fraudsters target accounts with 'one cent deposit' scam - 21 May 2007
INTERVIEWS
* Wells Fargo & Company at Lehman Brothers 10th Annual Financial Services Conference - Final - 23 May 2007
LAUNCHES
* Singapore's DBS Bank unveils plans for expansion in China - 25 May 2007
* ANZ and ING introduce direct access banking for pension funds - 25 May 2007
* Who launched the UK's first Internet bank? - 23 May 2007
* First National Bank of Omaha Launches Internet Bank - 22 May 2007
* Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank extends bill payments network - 22 May 2007
MARKETING
* Tenth anniversary of online banking - 27 May 2007
* Apacs marks 10 years of Web banking - 22 May 2007
* One-quarter of 50 Largest Online Advertisers are From Financial Services - 21 May 2007
MOBILE BANKING
* Mobile Phones Revolutionize African Banking - 24 May 2007
* ING Direct Adds Mobile Banking - 24 May 2007
* NY Times Reviews Citi Mobile - 24 May 2007
* Barclays introduces mobile banking services - 23 May 2007
* Bank of America completes m-banking roll out - 22 May 2007
PERSONAL FINANCE
* Mint.com Set to Freshen the Personal Finance Space* - 23 May 2007
REPORTS
* Traditional vs. online banking: Which one is for you? - 27 May 2007
* Case Study: Metrics Drive Wells Fargo's Home Page - 23 May 2007
* Online banking boosts direct debits - 23 May 2007
SOCIAL LENDING
* New Person-to-Person Lender, Lending Club, Hopes Facebook Linkage Allows it to Prosper - 25 May 2007
* Social lending goes red hot, as FaceBook enters the space with “LendingClub” - 25 May 2007
* Now there's big money in P2P - 22 May 2007
* Virgin enters the P2P loan market - 20 May 2007
SOCIAL NETWORKING
* Facebook | will people share their pictures, thoughts and information with commercial interests? - 26 May 2007
* Prosper and Forbes tap Facebook; Co-op Bank joins MySpace - 25 May 2007
* Social Networking to infinity and beyond - 25 May 2007
* Could FaceBook risk becoming another AOL? - 25 May 2007
* Social Network ad spending predicted to grow (eMarketer) - 24 May 2007
* Community ROI - a sensible view - 24 May 2007
* A sense of community - 23 May 2007
VENDORS
* Origo to develop XML standards for full mortgage applications - 24 May 2007
* Financial Objects ships mortgage module - 23 May 2007
Posted by Christophe on May 27, 2007 in Blogging, Customer comments, Customer experience, Events, Fraud, International, Interviews, Launches, Marketing, Mobile banking, News, Personal finance, Phishing, Reports, Social lending, Social networking, Vendors | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)