I look forward to contributing to a high-profile roundtable discussion on 'banking for the youths' organized and hosted by Google in Paris later today.
Patrick Kervern, Industry Leader Finance, and Anissa Talbi, Senior Industry Manager Finance, invited me to share my passion for social media and discuss the key initiatives from North America and Europe focusing on the youths.
Context The junior group (teenagers and young adults up to the age of 30)
represents a very interesting market for banks and insurers. They tend
to be a disloyal, fickle but informed sector. Key challenges: * Attracting juniors: Banks must capture
youngsters at an early stage rather than later. This is a difficult
group to attract and retain, so banks may need to adopt an aggressive
pricing policy and offer exciting auxiliary products and services. * Keeping juniors: Once banks have
attracted juniors, they must try and keep them and make them customers
for life (if possible). Young people easily change loyalties, so banks
need good offers and must innovate continuously to keep their interest.
It’s important to use the right language as the attitudes and nuances
of this market constantly change. Source:"Financial Services for Youths", EFMA.com
In the last couple of years, financial insitutions have started to leverage social media to engage with the youths. Their goals vary from recruiting talented graduates to providing financial education to teenagers and young professionals.
Let me share with you a list of social media initiatives from the banking industry focused on the Youth Market and sorted by country.
US * Wells Fargo - Stagecoach Island / Financial Education (blog & virtual world) * Chase - Chase +1 Credit Card / Financial Education (facebook) * TDECU - Young & Free Texas / Empowering the Youths (blog) * South Carolina Federal CU - Young & Free North Carolina / Empowering the Youths (blog) * PSCU Financial Servivces - Project New Age * The Ohio CU League - Money and Stuff * Numerica CU - It is all About GEN Y * Shell Federal CU - iLife * Mint.com - Personal Finance Management * Smartypig - Goal-Oriented Savings * WeProsper / Financial Education
Canada * Severus CU - Young & Free Alberta / Empowering the Youths (blog) * Vancity - Changeeverything (blog/online community) * RBC - Better Student Life (blog) * TD Canada Trust - TD Money Lounge (facebook) * RBC - Bankbook(facebook)
France * BNP Paribas - Starbank / Training & Induction (virtual world) * BNP Paribas - Ace Manager/ Recruitment (Competition)
Netherlands * ING - Planet Orange / Financial Education for kids (micro-site) * ING - Move Out, Move Up / Mortgages for young couples (microsite) * Rabobank - Hyves Profile / Social Networking
Belgium * Fortis - Mine.be / Initiative for teenagers
Australia * NAB - Ballet Community / Online Community for kids
Social Media Initiatives in Banking for the Youths
Being able to reach out and engage with Senior Executives and Top Managers from all around the world is what makes me carry on spending so much time on Visible Banking. In addition to my regular public speaking engagements, blogging gives me a unique opportunity to show I care and demonstrate my passion and my expertise for social media on daily basis.
VB Review ING's pickuradvisor initiative - August 2007 Two years ago the ING Asia Pacific eBusiness team impressed me. I reviewed in details an innovative social media initiative in the life insurance space launched by the bank in India "pickuradvisor.com".
In a nut shell, it was a blog with a light touch of online community features (you could find the short profiles of the advisors) coupled to a basic appointment booking system. It was very innovative for the insurance market in 2007. I shared my concerns on their lack of moderation process (I invite you to check my full review for more information)
After just a couple of hours David Garceran Nieuwenburg former Asia Pacific Regional Head at ING Group, now AVP - Asia Head e-Services at Sun Life Financial Asia, left a comment on my post thanking me and promising they would quickly address this issue. Just 48 hours later, I received another comment this time from the Head Marketing at ING Vysya Life Insurance in India to confirm they had already improved their moderation process. Very impressive.
Please note that before canning the project last year, ING improved the interface and rolled it out in Hong-Kong in Chinese. David was instrumental in most of the social media experiments launched by ING in 2006 and 2007. David is a great guy. At last I had the chance to spend a couple of days with him at the event I was chairing in Kuala Lumpur in April 2009, 'E-Channel Management for Retail Banking'.
VB Review SEB's the Benche - June 2009 I invite you to read my recent comments on The Benche, the online community for Trade Finance Professionals launched by SEB at the end of 2008.
I was delighted to participate to Econsultancy's 'the Future of Digital Marketing' event. Ashley and his team put together a great event with some inspirational speakers as well as a savvy and participative audience of over 300 digital marketers. It is pretty outstanding in the current market, congrats Econsultancy!
The innovative format worked well with two keynotes sessions and 4 industry focused sessions: Travel, Retail, Publishing/Media and Finance.
The first keynote was delivered by an inspired Eric Frenchman, Chief Internet Strategist at Connell Donatelli, from New Jersey. Eric shared with us his experience in digital marketing and politics gained while he was working on the John McCain's campaign last year. Needless to say that Obama and his team put social media on the radar after such a successful presidential campaign and an outstanding amount of money raised via my.barackobama.com. But if found it Interesting to see the campaign from a different angle.
As far as I am concerned, I enjoyed the publishing/media session the most and it is not only because it was the only (!) session with a female speaker Louise White, Group Marketing Director at Incisive Media. She did a great job by the way. Jonathan MacDonald's "stand-up act" was entertaining, creative, and disruptive. The future is mobile!
A special thanks to the awesome audience, and congrats to my fellow speakers!
Social Media in Banking & Financial Services My goal for the FODM was to make people realize that financial institutions are already trying to engage with people via social media. Nevertheless, very few are doing it right. And it gave me the chance to clarify a few things and share with the audience some of the topics we covered the night before with some prominent bankers and industry bloggers during our (at some point heated) conversations at the latest event organized by Chris Skinner's Financial Services Club "Do Banks get Social … and understand 21st century?"
Twitter is Not the Ultimate Answer but it is Definitely Not a Stunt I focused on twitter to make people realize that loads of financial insitutions are already engaging on this popular micro-blogging platform. Is Twitter the answer to all our customer service inefficiencies? No. Is it here to stay? I am not sure it is going to be around forever. But it is certainly not a stunt.
Please find below a tweet I found today: #barclays couldnt withdraw money, online banking down. customer announcement on site? no. searched twitter to confirm it wasnt just me Not convinced yet?
You can't argue that Twitter is an amazing tool for real-time market research. It would be foolish not to start monitoring the popular micro-blogging site now. As a brand, it is extremely valuable to know what people are thinking about you, your competitors, the industry, the regulation, in real time.
Moreover I really see twitter as an excellent way to give further exposure to your other social media initiatives like a blog, a facebook page or a YouTube channel.
Forget the technology, focus on People! But at the end of the day, I believe social media is all about people not technologies or platforms. It is important for me to track what people are making of twitter, facebook, YouTube, blogs or any kind of other relevant web 2.0 platforms. We need to understand how they engage on those networks.
But I have never advised a client to do launch a blog, an online community or a virtual island for the sake of it. It would be a mistake. First, I need to understand your business objectives and see if and how social media could support them. It is critical to find the best way to REWARD your members.
Must do, whether you like it or not! Even if you don't want to engage with your detractors, you don't believe in social media or you think it is not for your well-established brand, there are a few things you can't afford not to do in 2009.
1. Learn about social media in your industry 2. Listen to what people say about your brand, your product, your industry, your competitors 3. Increase your official presence on all the most popular social media sites to prevent brand hijacking and start building an audience (start now, it takes a lot of time and effort) Social Media: Different Projects, Different Challenges In banking, there are four kinds of social media projects: * Social Media for your employees (intranet) * Social Media for your clients (online banking) * Social Media - Open B-to-B * Social Media - Open B-to-C
Common Questions and Concerns * Why isn't the UK banking industry more advanced?
* Why do you blog on Visible Banking? * Do people really want to join a bank's community? * How can banks start building trust with social media? * Concerns - Social Media is not scalable! * Concerns - We must provide a consistent customer experience even on sites like twitter! * Concerns - Limited Resources. We won't be able to contact everybody and match their expectations
My slide: Visible Banking Statistics on Twitter and YouTube, Facebook, Blogs Please find below my presentation which is featured on the slideshare's homepage today!
Pictures
Coverage of the event on twitter Please find below 12 of the best tweets posted on Wednesday during the event (#fodm).
greenwellys: Hi to all at #fodm if you think the speaker line up is Impressive you should see the delegates :-)
helentr: #fodm Fans create much better ads. Yes We Can video 18.2m views / Crush on Obama 14.4m Total videos: equiv $40m TV advertising
AlWightman: #FoDM
Rational marketing (SEO, SEM, EMAIL, AFFLIATES) vs. Emotional Marketing
(Social Media, Online PR) Don't measure them in the same way.
econsultancy: Nick Ray on geospatial marketing @ #fodm: charities using Google Earth to promote causes/engage with users
checkyourfuel: Enjoyed listening to Christophe Langlois of Visible Banking at #fodm. Spoke about social platform opps for FiServ institutions.
econsultancy: Retailers looking to integrate online & store: don't lose customers because they don't want to buy online #fodm
SearchGoat: Interesting... Keiron Smith's presentation at #fodm... "99% of mktg campaigns have no impact" via @Aizlewood
checkyourfuel: At #fodm - Graham Ruddick: B2B publishing = apocalypse now; not cyclical, but structural. Clearly, life in publishing is pretty grim.
juliansambles: BBC have 110 newsletters delivering 360m emails each year #fodm
kungfudigital: Brilliant speakers today at #FoDM let you know who to follow tomorrow, thanks to @econsultancy for putting on another great event!
eburypublishing: I'm back! Fantastic presentations at #fodm yesterday - really inspiring stuff. I'll post some links to round ups later on today
Made it to the SlideShare Finance Page And this morning, I was happily surprised to receive an email from the SlideShare team announcing that the presentation I delivered in Kuala Lumpur and Rotterdam is currently featured on their 'Finance' page!
Visible Banking - Social Media, People First (April 2009) Yesterday I uploaded the slides of the presentation I delivered in Rotterdam on April 22nd which is basically the same presentation I delivered in Kuala Lumpur on April 21st plus a few slides on the Dutch/Belgian banks ABN AMRO, Fortis, ING and Rabobank.
The event had speaker panels and interactive sessions to
facilitate exchanges of information and ideas between a strictly
limited audience of senior European banking executives from over 10 countries.
I contacted Daan on Linkedin last year to invite him to speak at one of our internal innovation dinners at Lloyds TSB.
Daan
presented three social media initiatives he helped ABN AMRO launch in
the last couple of years to: capture customer feedback - blackboard (launched in Q4 2007) -, support the SME market with an online community - flametree -, and provide an entertaining experience on second life.
ABN AMRO created flametree to help entrepreneurs to network, share their knowledge and trade. By the way, Daan's team will launch flametree phase 2 later this week. The interface will be totally different, stay tuned!
I loved this quote from Daan's presentation, 'Being transparent requires more guts than talking about transparency.'
The event had speaker panels and interactive sessions to
facilitate exchanges of information and ideas between a strictly
limited audience of senior European banking executives from over 10 countries.
I really enjoyed Matthias presentation. I found it inspiring and
refreshing too. Matthias came to present the new social media
initiative they launched a week ago to better connect with the market
and engage with their clients: Fidor Community Banking. Their tagline: "we are strong together!".
They also provide an online tool for Personal Financial Management, gemege.de,
and an idea generation platform to invite people to contribute to the
design of fidor's new products (and be rewarded for their contribution).
Fidor's approach in social media is good to some extent that they are trying to reach and engage with people where it makes sens online.
The fidor team is experimenting, which is critical in social media, and they still have to reach a critical mass of users on their various pages and groups to start proper conversations, better engage with their members, and urge them to contribute and collaborate. Good start, well done Matthias!
Interview with Matthias (Paris, 19-Mar-09) I invite you to watch my interview with Matthias, a passionate entrepreneur who starterd his career in the hospitality business.
Matthias was one of the investors in Xing, one of the leading online business networks in Europe, he really gets social media and he really wants to involve people and reward them. A must see.
The event had speaker panels and interactive sessions to
facilitate exchanges of information and ideas between a strictly
limited audience of senior European banking executives.
Participants and Speakers from over 10 countries It was an informative, insightful, day on social media in banking and financial services. Shame the current challenging times made it difficult for bankers to travel and attend the conference.
Nevertheless, we were around 30 people in total, speakers included, from the following companies: ABN AMRO, e-laCaixa, capco, ASN Bank, Bank Hapoalim, Banco Sabadell, Banque Cantonale Vaudoise - BCV, Cardif, Cercle des Investisseurs Prives, CheBanca!, fidor ag, Fortis Bank, GIE BNP, Paribas Assurance, Google, Gras Savoye, LCL, Mapa UK, Orange Business Services, Quintess, Rabobank, Raiffeisen Bank (Serbia), Raiffeisen International Bank, Serveis Informatics La Caixa, The Networking Company, Visible Media Ltd.
It was great to catch up with Catherine Ossemerct (congratulations Catherine for the good news!), Pol Navarro (glad we had the chance to have dinner together), Joep Paemen (thanks Joep for recommending me), Mark Pavan, and the EFMA team.
I was delighted to sit next to Jean-Michel Billaut for most of the day, meet with Daan Josephus Jitta at last and meet with one of my readers from Spain, Xavier Bermudez (thanks Xavier for your kind words on Visible Banking).
Wrap up - People First!
Please find below my initial comments on the day and most of the presentations.
More or less all the speakers insisted on the importance of educating people (internally and externally), being transparent, and starting to experiment now.
But if you ask me, I have heard the word "scared" too many time when they were referring to responding to user-generated-content. Also, I was hoping more speakers would underline the importance of monitoring online discussions.
Thumbs up * Catherine who fought until the end for her award winning initiative in the social network space and who reminded the importance of having an Executive sponsor and involving the Business, * Pol who demonstrated the higher ROI for social media marketing campaigns due to some excellent profiling hence better targeting, * Daan who plans to fully maximize their investment in social networking and use their platform internally too, * Matthias who aims to reward his users for their contribution like very few company ever did before, and * Casper from Rabobank who came up with a methodology to measure social media, and emphasized the importance to monitor online discussions.
Presentations * Fidor - 'Retail Banking 2.0': I really enjoyed Matthias presentation. I found it inspiring and refreshing too. Matthias came to present the new social media initiative they launched a week ago to better connect with the market and engage with their clients: Fidor Community Banking. Their tagline: "we are strong together!".
They also provide an online tool for Personal Financial Management, gemege.de, and an idea generation platform to invite people to contribute to the design of fidor's new products (and be rewarded for their contribution). More next week in my video interview with Matthias.
* ABN AMRO - 'Experimenting with social media: vision, learnings and insights': I contacted Daan on Linkedin last year to invite him to speak at one of our internal innovation dinners at Lloyds TSB. Daan presented three social media initiatives he helped ABN AMRO launch in the last couple of years to: capture customer feedback - blackboard -, support the SME market with an online community - flametree -, and provide an entertaining experience on second life.
By the way, Daan's team will launch flametree phase 2 next week. The interface will be totally different, stay tuned!
I loved this quote from Daan's presentation, 'Being transparent requires more guts than talking about transparency.' More next week in my video interview with Daan.
* Rabobank - 'Virtual communities and the Rabobank: evolution, not revolution!': it is obvious Casper is passionate about social media and he spent a lot of time experimenting online. Even though I would tweak it a bit, I enjoy Casper's methodology to classify virtual communities and assess the level and type of engagement from the bank.
Rabobank is one of the most active European financial institutions in social media: not only they have a dedicated 'webcare team' to monitor online discussions and respond, but their direct banks in Belgium, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand implemented blogging, customer reviews, and podcasts. I invite you to watch the video interview I shot in Singapore last year with Casper's colleague, Edwin Van Raalte, Senior Manager Business Development.
Last year, Rabobank launched RaboSport an online tv channel dedicated to the sporting teams and events they sponsor like "le tour de France". Unlike Nykredit and Jyske Bank which also allocated a sizable budget to launch their own TV channels, Rabobank also have a YouTube channel with the same video hosted on the popular service. I asked a question to Casper about their presence on YouTube, and I enjoyed his answer: 'we created the YouTube channel because the videos ended up on Youtube anyway!'
* Fortis Bank - 'Engaging the European Entrepreneur': it was great to catch up with Catherine. She launched Join2Grow.biz, the first ever online community for European Entrepreneur launched by a major bank back in February 2007 (in just 6 months). Fortis won 6 award and experienced an excellent, global, press coverage in 2007.
I was disappointed to find out in February that Fortis Bank decided to stop this innovative social media experiment. On the other hand, I wasn't too surprised because the current situation is pretty tough for the Belgium bank and the Executive sponsor has moved on.
I agree with Catherine on budget and timeline: it takes time to build a trusted online community and you need a minimum of three years to draw the appropriate conclusions.
* Banco Sabadell - 'How the social media is impacting marketing communication and the next marketing wave': Pol and I share a similar passion for social media. We are both active users of social media sites like facebook, linkedin or twitter. I invite you to check Pol's presentation on slideshare. Pol insisted on the importance of being transparent, honest, and managing your community.
He also introduced the audience to Banco Sabadell's mashup with google calendar, their page on facebook, their YouTube channel and their Twitter feed. 'Loyalty = Economy of emotion'. More next week in my video interview with Pol.
Interview During the 1-day event, I managed to interview three of the key speakers and one of the most famous French bloggers. Please note that the interview with Jean-Michel is only my second interview in French (the first one was with Pierre Chappaz, Kelkoo's Founder, shot in Switzerland back in November 2007)
What a great line up: Michael Ferrari (smartypig.com), Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), Nichelle Stephens (KeepingNickels), Murali Subbarao (Billeo).
I initially got in touch with Michael when I was working in Innovation at Lloyds TSB, I had the pleasure to interview both Aaron (twice) and Murali at a couple of Finovate events in the US. I look forward to catching up with them, and meeting with Nichelle, in San Francisco at FinovateStartup09.
Mint.com adds One Millionth User Mint became the fastest-growing personal finance software ever, reaching 1 million users in just 18 months.
A quote from Aaron: "Our mission has always been to help people save and do more with their money. Our rapid growth demonstrates that an unprecedented number of people are finding real value in what we offer. And this is just the beginning. We will continue to enhance our service while expanding in new directions. In dialog with our users, it’s clear that there are still significant ways in which we can help Americans better understand their finances, and make better-informed decisions, with our innovative approach to personal financial management.” I invite you to read the excellent post "Three Principles of Personal Finance: All You Need to Know for Financial Success" Aaron wrote a few days before his consultation with the National Economic Council at the White House.
Smartypig Teams Up with Money Management Sites SmartyPig, the leader in the social banking space, today announced the launch of its OFX Solution, enabling customers to add their SmartyPig accounts into their preferred money management sites. The integration syncs SmartyPig accounts directly into online account aggregators, including: Buxfer, Microsoft Money, Mint.com, MoneyStrands, Thrive, Wesabe and Yodlee. Geezeo and Rudder are coming soon.
A quote from Michael: “At SmartyPig we recognize how important it is to securely manage your finances, set goals and help change the credit card mindset of ‘buy now, pay later,’ that has contributed to the current downturn. Being able to see all your accounts in one place is a critical step in taking control of your finances. We selected an OFX solution because it’s the most widely adopted open standard for exchanging financial information between consumers and financial services, and we aimed to grant this ability to the largest possible number of customers.”
The event will have speaker panels and interactive sessions to
facilitate exchanges of information and ideas between a strictly
limited audience of senior European banking executives. Key speakers Please find below the list of key speakers:
"A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets usually but not always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash. Widgets often take the form of on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, daily weather etc)." Source:WikipediA.org
This is one the slides I use in my presentations on social media in banking and financial services.
Just a few statistics from Facebook on that matter: 95% of the 175million active Facebook users have used at least one of the 52,000 applications built on Facebook platform.
A few banking / financial services institutions are already experimenting widgets such as Fidelity, MBNA, Amplify Credit Union or Standard Chartered. Of course, the leading startups in online finance have also launched their own facebook applications, iphone application or mac/vista widgets: check Wesabe or Mint.com.
Worklight helps its clients reach customers, channels, employees, and partners securely in the places they frequent online, such as iGoogle, Windows Live, desktop widgets, RSS readers, Facebook, the Apple iPhone and more.
A few days before leaving London to Bahrain to speak at MEFTEC, I met Shahar Kaminitz, Worklight's Founder & CEO. I invite you to watch my video interview and find out more about Shahar's vision for the banking/financial services industry.
“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
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