Webank | Are people replacing institutions?

Is the democratic and social nature of the internet changing the way we understand finance?

While in the past web-enabled innovation in the sector meant online banking and web-access to front-end customer services, there is today a growing set of organisations which remove banks and other institutions as intermediaries altogether.   Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer finance.

Mobile social money, the final frontier? In the final part of discussions of social networks, media, banking and money, I thought I would turn attention to the use of mobile devices as access media to these networks. Mobile usage in banking has grown to a crescendo in the past year, after bubbling away nicely since the turn of this century. This is in part down to the fact that the latest smartphones allow a bank to deploy fully functional internet banking services to mobile devices using the same platform as their main websites. In other words, it is now cost-effective and appropriate to do this. However, the challenge with mobile finance is that we tend to discuss mobiles as one homogenous group of devices when: (a) there are many devices; and (b) the use of mobile devices to access financial services are not homogenous. Let’s look at (a) first.

Internet Banking: 2010 and beyond I’ve been reading a range of articles about the next generation internet, or the semantic web as it is called by those in the trade. Semantic is a method of looking for the meaning and relationships between things, and the semantic web effectively moves us away from files and downloads to databases and integration. In practice, this means that rather than going on to the internet to pull things out and push emails and files around, the internet continually monitors you and your tastes and finds things to push at you which match your electronic lifestyle. In other words, it makes everything online much more relevant to you as an individual, and moves us away from having to search because the semantic web will find for you. Take the way we use Google today. When you go into Google and search, it is very rare that you find what you want straight away. In fact, you often have to crawl through screen after screen, and change searches three or four times to even come close. The semantic web overcomes these difficulties because you will not have to search. The semantic web knows you and finds for you. It knows you work for a bank or technology firm, and therefore knows that when you say ‘payments’ you mean it in a professional sense, not a generic sense. Therefore it senses the most relevant things to the way you search and your profile of usual interests.

Technology is a key for banking in 2009 I found a whole range of technology predictions for 2009.  One of the best general forecasts comes from Gartner, who say that the top ten technology areas to focus upon during an economic crisis are:1. Reduce headcount or freeze hiring2. Renegotiate with technology and service providers3. Curtail data center expansion, virtualize assets and lease them back4. Consolidate systems5. Outsource commodity6. Offshore outsource7. Investment shutdown8. Prioritize projects9. Mothball businesses and projects10. Change leadership and restructure IT teamsI agree with this list.In banking, it goes further.  In banking, technology is a critical part of the solution for the crisis, and technology also provides a way to avoid the crisis occurring again.  That is why I titled this as technology providing 'a key for banking in 2009'.Technology is the key. 

The next boom starts in ... 2014? I don't normally share or post my speeches - I prefer to just talk rather than read - but I wrote my speech last night for a dinner presentation and thought I would share with you a shorter version here.  The speech disappointed a few folks as it forecast two years of flat or negative growth to 2011, three years of slow growth to 2014, and then another boom period from 2014 onwards.  They wanted the boom forecast to be more like 2010 (a year away?) but hey, I could paint nice rosy pictures to make you all feel happy, but what the heck, I'd just be lying.