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.
Pol and I share a similar passion for social media. We are both active
users of social media sites like facebook, linkedin or twitter. If you are passionate about innovation, I highly recommend you to follow Pol on Twitter.
During his presentation, Pol insisted on the importance of being transparent, honest, and managing your community.
They also have a link to their rss feed on their homepage. Unfortunately the Banco Sabadell Labs, their JV with IBM to tap social media, has gone quiet since the announcement back in June 2007.
A few comments: * Overall, Banco Sabadell is one of the most experimental banks in Europe which reinforces the importance of having a Director or an Executive who is happy to champion social media: Wells Fargo has Tim Collins, Ed Terpening and its CMO, SEB has Lars Milleberg, Raboplus has Greg McAweeney... * I love the power of blogging and social media: my coverage of the EFMA event on social media appears on the first page on Google with the key words 'Banco Sabadell Social Media' * On Twitter, BancoSabadell is only following two of their employees (@Pol and @Xavier, both from the Innovation team). I would be delighted for @VisibleBanking to join this exclusive club too! ;)
Interview with Pol (Paris, 19-Mar-09) I invite you to watch my interview with Pol.
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)
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:
Philippe asked me not only to share my vision of social media in the banking industry, but also to do a wrap up of his Online & Mobile events in Athens.
It was the first time I delivered my presentation in French. Now I am totally ready for my speaking engagement in Paris next week: I look forward to sharing my vision of social media with an audience made of senior managers at one of the major French banks.
As usual, Philippe managed to organize an excellent event with a strong line up. The audience was essentially made of bankers, insurers, subject matter experts and journalists.
Please find below my comments on some of the topics related to social media and innovation.
Ecureuil Mobile: the importance of innovation Herve Leroux, CNCE: Herve understands social media. In one of his slides, he named a few emerging models such as prosper, zopa, mint, and smartypig.
Herve presented the CNCE strategy based on channel convergence. They want to be seen as innovative, which is challenging in a time of crisis. His presentation was essentially focused on mobile banking.
The opportunity offered by mbanking is quite significant: 15million use internet banking and 23% of mobile users visit their bank on their phone. The CNCE target two key segments: youth and senior.
When Herve joined CNCE in 2005, the group didn't have any mobile offering, whereas most banks in France were already providing a wap service.
Herve was pleased to announce the recent initiative they launched a couple of weeks ago: Ecureuil Mobile. In their branches, th CNCE started to sell cellphones with their Java applications pre-installed, with a monthly subscription and their own Ecureuil Mobile SIM card. Please note that the CNCE act as a distributor, not a MVNO.
Are virtual worlds a genuine opportunity to banks? Gilbert Reveillon, LaSer: I really enjoyed Gilbert's presentation. He is so passionate about virtual worlds. I believe he is currently in China to meet with a few innovative companies in that space, among them QQ.
Gilbert mentioned a study from Gartner saying that soon, 100% of the Fortune 500 companies will have a presencon a virtual world. He also reminded us that 95% of the business schools in North America are on Second Life.
I agree that virtual worlds could offer a good platform to drive collaboration within a global company, and they could be a great tool to drive the co-creation of products. Nevertheless, I am still to be convinced there is a big opportunity for banks.
I see the value if you are the first bank to do something innovative on a virtual world like Second Life: Wells Fargo launched their Stagecoach Island back in 2005, ABN Amro launched their Virtual Holland in 2007, ING & Renault F1 launched a virtual pit, Deutsche Bank launched their Q110 branch of the future earlier this year.
I see an opportunity for financial education, recruitment, and collaboration. Whatever your initiative, you have to be entertaining!
MonMobileAdore.com: "forget" the ROI, start experimenting now! Christophe Houze, MMA: Christophe presented MMA's MonMobileAdore.com, the initiative in the online/mobile space they launched 12 months ago.
MMA launched monmobileadore to make mobile browsing easier. It is a web portal with over 350 mobile references. You create your mobispace with your favourite links, then you send an sms with a link to your mobispace. Most of the marketing is viral, and they will soon launch a blog to help spread the word.
It is an experiment first, they didn't make their decision based on the potential ROI which is limited. They want to be seen as innovative, and identify more brand advocates.
Other successful initiatives from MMA * zerotracas.com launched in 2005 (280,000 tests in 2007) * Capt'ain de soiree (50,000 users)
Online Banking - Statistics in France: increased usage & confidence Bernard Dutreuil, Federation Bancaire Francaise (FBF): Bernard presented the findings from their annual survey, "l'observatoire IFOP/FBF" (June 2008).
It looks like more and more French people are comfortable using online banking, mainly for its convenience. I was slightly surprised to find out that more and more people believe that banks do a good job with online security and confidentiality of their data. Nevertheless, online fraud still remains a challenge, and there is no industry standard in France for the authentication mechanism which is still perceived as a competitive advantage.
Online banking * 64% of bank customers use online banking at least once a week (60% last year) * 34% never use online banking (36% last year)
Security * 73% of the respondents find their online banking secure (65% last year) * 21% find online banking not secure (23% last year)
Wrap up Internet & Mobile (Athens 2008) Last month, I had the chance to travel to Athens to contribute to the EFMA Online & Mobile events.
If you have a limited budget for conferences next year, I suggest you consider traveling to Paris for the 2009 edition. The format/quality of the events (audience + speakers) is fairly unique & the networking is excellent.
I invite you to check my wrap up of the two events:
I had a great time in Athens. the quality of the speakers and the attendees was again outstanding.
I will do my best to come up with a comprehensive and insightful wrap up.
Study day "Internet et Mobile" in Paris "Parlez-vous francais"? If the answer is yes, I recommend you to attend EFMA's study day on November 28th.
I am looking forward to this event. First, it feels good to participate to a conference in my homeland France, but more importantly because Philippe gave me not only the opportunity to share my vision of social media in the banking industry, but also the responsibility to present a short wrap-up of the EFMA Online Finance and Mobile Finance events from early November in Athens.
Brilliant: the event was a perfect reflection of the current trends in online banking Congratulations to Philippe who came up with the best possible line up in terms of content, range of topics and insights. I found the event brilliant!
First of all, I was delighted that a third of the 14 presentations touched upon web 2.0 and social media (Tim Collins - Wells Fargo, Tony de Bree - ABN Amro, Dennis Pereira - SNS Reaal, Massimo Cicardo - BNL, and myself). Even Tal
Shlasky - Bank Hapoalim focused on social media when he unveiled their new PFM tool.
Even though nowadays bankers show more and more interest in social media, most of them still don’t appreciate the importance and the size of the opportunity.
Banks are late. Even though most banks are busy upgrading their online
channel and getting rid of their legacy systems in favour of SOA and
fully content managed systems, and despite their aspiration to be seen
as an Amazon online and their aim for higher Net Promoter Scores, banks
are still late.
Put your hands up in the air Since March 2007 I have been busy evangelizing social media at over a dozen industry leading events worldwide. Every single time I speak at an industry leading conference, wherever the event takes place (US, Europe or Asia), I always start my presentation by assessing the number of delegates involved on social media projects.
In Athens, the number of hands was still low. But it was even worse at Retail Banking Innovations in Singapore last month:
out of 180 people, less than 10 people raised their hands. Interesting statistic considering that China on its own counts over 42 million bloggers out of the 475 million bloggers worldwide (source: McCann's Social Media Tracker Wave 3, March 2008).
If I exclude the speakers, just a handful of people confirmed their involvement in the space. Among them was Vittoria La Porta
from WeBank. I had a good chat with her and I was impressed to see how active in web 2.0 WeBank is, and how much effort they put in developing good relationships with prominent bloggers in Italy. I invite you to check the web 2.0 tile on their homepage.
But the industry is acknowledging the importance of participating to online discussions and
engaging with the market: more and more sizable, well established, banks
are experimenting and launching social media initiatives. Just last
week,
firstdirect (UK) launched its littleblackbook initiative, and SEB
(Sweden) launched their social network for trade finance professionals,
The Benche.
Please check my initial comments in the Posted Items section on the Visible Banking Page on Facebook. Wanted - social media champions & subject matter experts All the most active and experimental banks have at least one social media champion in their Senior Management (CxO level). It is critical to have that kind of support to get any traction. Your Management doesn't appreciate the importance of social media and still see User Generated Content (UGC) as a big threat? Focus on education first: organize a few internal social media workshops and taylored one-to-one sessions with the Senior Management, invite industry experts... We love business cases in the industry, and further down the line it is very likely you will have to produce some solid ones to promote your web 2.0 initiatives... Except if you have enough power and trust at your bank, like Dennis at SNS Reaal who launched their customer stories in a timely manner without business case. Impressive. For
the time being social media remains tactical, and except Wells Fargo
very few banks have a proper, integrated, social media strategy. And
most of the banks which tried haven't succeeded yet, they need
direction.
Great networking I had the chance to discuss social media, one-to-one, with my peers from Absa Bank, Alfa Bank, alpha Bank, Banco Best, Bank Hapoalim, BNL, CSOB, Ditzo, Eventricity, Federation des Caisses Desjardins, Google, Liberty International, Melania, Mobey Forum, Monte Dei Paschi Di Siena, Nomura Research Institute, NyKredit, OTP Bank, PWC, Rabobank, Rabobank, RATP, Swedbank, WeBank.
I had a great time in Athens. the quality of the speakers and the attendees was again outstanding. Congratulations to Philippe and the rest of the EFMA team.
Tony de Bree, Senior Consultant at ABN Amro
Please note that Tony shared his own views and opinions during the event and my interview.
Tony (left on the picture) and I started to share our views on web 2.0 a few months back, via linkedin. I invite you to visit Tony's blog.
It was a pleasure to attend his entertaining presentation, "How web 2.0 can help large financial institutions through the current crisis" in Athens. I totally agree with Tony: "I like chaos: it is an opportunity to create something new".
Please find below 3 of the 7 killer apps for web 2.0, listed by Tony: * Using web 2.0 within organisations to “blow up” the company / split it * Merging internal apps and external collaborative environments in real time to become client-centric * Standardizing all user experiences (internal & external) and connecting everybody to everybody (when allowed)
But Tony reminded us that New Technology + Old Organisation = Expensive Old Organisation.
I invite you to watch my video interview with Tony:
I had a great time in Athens. the quality of the speakers and the attendees was again outstanding. Congratulations to Philippe and the rest of the EFMA team.
NyKredit's WebDesk, the Winner of the 2008 Online Award Again, congratulations to Thomas and Lene from NyKredit. Despit a fierce competition, the majority of the audience voted for their recently enhanced WebDesk service.
They launched the first version of WebDesk back in January 2007. The service wasn't that intuitive nor easy to use. The conversion rates never really took off.
NyKredit never lost hope in this interactive chat service, and they successfully launched WebDesk phase 2 in July 2008. As a result, they saw an increase of 500% in nb of leads and 400% in online sales. Well done.
NyKredit 2.0 I must admit I wasn't aware that NyKredit has been so active in the social media space in the last couple of years.
What a busy year 2007 for NyKredit: they launched an interactive video service, WebDesk phase 1, a blog, an idea generation plartform, and a few Rich Internet Apps (RIAs).
Video & Online TV: the next big thing in banking? Last month, NyKredit launched their own tv channel, NyKredit.tv.
Kindly, Thomas made me aware of Jyske Bank's impressive push in the video space with jyskebank.tv. They produce about 10 new videos everyday!
Thomas Kragh - Chef Internet & Lene Klausen - Project Consultant I invite you to watch my video interview with Thomas and Lene.
I had a great time in Athens. Even though you could feel the credit crunch (in Barcelona last year, the audience was twice as big), the quality of the speakers and the attendees was still outstanding. Congratulations to Philippe and the rest of the EFMA team.
Tim Collins, SVP Experiential Marketing at Wells Fargo Eventually, I managed to shoot my video interview with Tim! In the last 18 months, we met two times in London and we almost had lunch together in San Francisco after Jim Bruene's FinovateStartup08.
Wells Fargo's Someday Stories We started the interview talking about the latest social media experiment from Wells, launched six months ago: Wells Fargo's Someday Stories.
It is an integration of the classic promotion with social media. The competition will end this week. They received over 100,000 votes. Wells did a good job spreading the word: they launched a Facebook page (250+ fans), they contacted bloggers, participated to blogger events.
Wells Fargo, a Social Media Pioneer Then we talked about blogging (moderation, negative comments, spam), relationship with Legal & Compliance (or shall I say partnership), employee advocacy and employee retention, success criteria and strategy which are both depending on the goals from the Business. I invite you to watch my video interview with Tim:
“Christophe's book is really the must-have synopsis of the current state-of-play in social media in banking. Christophe has taken a deep passion for the topic, and turned it into an account of the landscape valuable to anyone who has social media responsibilities in financial services” James Gardner, General Manager at Spigit
“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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