Conference Calendar

Who Wants to Go to Banking Camp in Seattle?

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: BarCamp Bank, Conference Calendar

Being somewhat older than the 20-something coders the frequent the Silicon Valley/Toronto/Paris/Austin BarCamp scene (Wikipedia definition, website), I'm not quite sure what to expect when the banking version, BarCamp Bank, comes to Seattle next weekend (July 21/22).

But simply knowing that the Trabian gurus, Brent Dixon and Trey Reeme, will be in attendance assures that it will be eye-opening and fun. There's also the king of banking social media, Ed Terpening of Wells Fargo as well as William Azaroff, Pierre Burns, and Monica Mashal from pioneering Vancity and Ben Morales the creative thinker behind many cool initiatives at Washington State Employees Credit Union. And so far, just one representative from the hot personal finance space, Marc Hedlund from Wesabe (here's the full registration list so far).

The idea is to gather a bunch of innovative thinkers in one spot, drink coffee, eat pizza and try to change the world, one payment at a time. All in one weekend.

It's beautiful in Seattle this time of year, if you can make it, drop your $35 into this form ASAP and I'll see you next week. Otherwise, we'll be writing about it of course.

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Links from ABA’s Webinar: Extreme Website Makeovers

By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Conference Calendar

Thanks to everyone who tuned in today to the American Bankers Association webinar on website design. And for those of you on the call, please let me know what you thought of the presentations either by private email, or via the comments below. It's the first time I've been involved in a 2-hour Webinar, and I'm curious about the experience from the listener's perspective.

The ABA's Doug Johnson pulled together the following panel and served as master of ceremonies: 

  • Jim Bruene, editor & founder, Online Banking Report and NetBanker blog
  • Clay Morgan, creative services manager, Intuit's Digital Insight
  • David Rubini, product usability director, Intuit's Digital Insight
  • Richard Carlisle, CIO, Valley National Bank of New Mexico

    • This session was a Web-based version of the session we gave in Palm Springs earlier this year (coverage here). My 20-minute presentation included examples from some favorite financial websites. Here are the links:

    Overall Bank/Web 2.0 Design
    1. Buxfer buxfer.com: Web 2.0 design/functionality (A-)
    2. Wesabe wesabe.com: Quicken meets Zagat (A-)
    3. Billq mybillq.com: Award-winning bill payment tracker (A)
    4. Prosper prosper.com: Before and After shots of its recent web redesign, nice job reducing clutter, (A-)

    Homepage Focus
    5. Wachovia wachovia.com: Not-so-great design, and way too cluttered (C+)
    6. Google google.com: Legendary focus on what matters (A++)
    7. Bank of America bankofamerica.com: Good design, but still too much clutter (A-)
    8. ING Direct ingdirect.com: Great design, no clutter (A)

    Sales
    9. Attention: U.K. montage: smile.co.uk, egg.co.uk, alliance-leicester.co.uk
    10. Interest: E*Trade Bank etradebank.com: Great at selling key products (A)
    11. Desire: High-yield savings montage: emigrantdirect.com (A), hsbcdirect.com (A), mybankingdirect.com (A)
    12. Desire: Progressive Insurance progressive.com: Great comparisons to competition using scrolling summary of other users' search results (A-)
    13. Action: NextCard: No longer online (A+)

    Customer Interaction/Satisfaction
    14. Wells Fargo blogs blog.wellsfargo.com: Look especially at the StudentLoanDown (A), which demonstrates how to communicate with a Web-savvy niche audience
    15. UW Credit Union RSS feeds uwcu.org/rss: One of the first, if not THE first, U.S. financial institution to offer RSS feeds of its Web-based. The CU has also added RSS auto-discover technology as seen in the address box (screenshot below)

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    Conference Notebook: Mobile Payment Forum

    By Jim Bruene Posted on
    Categories: Conference Calendar, Mobile Banking, Mobile Payments

    Mobile Payment Forum link I attended the public portion of the 2-day Mobile Payment Forum Spring Member Meeting in San Diego yesterday <mobilepaymentforum.org>. The group was formed by MasterCard, Visa, American Express and JCB more than five years ago to help develop standards and promote best practices in mobile payments.

    The current board of directors:

    • Simon Pugh, VP Standards & Infrastructure, MasterCard 
    • Stephanie Ericksen, VP Product Technology & Integration, Visa
    • Martin Harrison, Head of Sales and Strategy, First Data
    • Christopher J. Bierbaum, Product Development, Emerging Products Group, Sprint
    • Bob Adamany, VeriSign
    • Oliver Kelly, Vodafone

    It was a pay-to-present day, with each sponsor allotted time based on the size of their financial contribution. Six gold sponsors spoke for 30 minutes, a silver sponsor was allotted 15 minutes, and the only platinum one was handed the podium for a full hour. Consultant Richard Crone of Crone Consulting gave the keynote and handled the introductions and wrap-up.  

    Platinum Sponsor:
    ClairMail: Joseph Salesky, CEO

    Gold Sponsors:
    Firethorn Mobile: Tripp Rackley, CEO
    PayCash Mobile (Cyphermint): CEO, Joseph Barboza
    eBizMobility: CEO, Jeremy Kagan
    Erico: VP Marketing, Larry Loper
    mFoundry: VP Product, John Pizzi

    Silver Sponsor:
    Sapphire Mobile Systems: Rick Rasansky, CEO

    For the most part, the speakers did a commendable job keeping things informative and not heading straight to sales-pitch mode (see note 1). The highlight was Firethorn CEO Tripp Rackley and ClairMail CEO making impassioned pitches on opposite sides of the SMS banking (ClairMail) vs. downloaded app (Firethorn) continuum (note 2). And as usual, Richard Crone of Crone Consulting set the stage with an entertaining and fact-filled keynote (note 3). 

    Despite being a payments forum, most of the talk centered around online banking (Firethorn, ClairMail, mFoundry, Sapphire), mobile advertising (Erico), and ecommerce (eBizMobility). Only PayCash Mobile and keynoter Richard Crone spent more than a few minutes on payments. 

    The main reason: Mobile banking is on the verge of breaking out, and banks are reaching for their checkbooks. With far more infrastructure hurdles, cellphone-based payments will lag mobile banking adoption by five years (see forecast in our most-recent Online Banking Report, 138/139).

    I'll post a few more items from the conference during the next few days.

    Note:

    1. Hint for conference attendees: Always look for private-company CEO presentations. Private-company CEOs usually do a great job speaking about the broader issues, understanding that their industry knowledge is a far better sales pitch for their organization than a dozen "About us" slides. Marketing VPs on the other hand, seem enamored with how many times they can work their company and client names into the presentation deck. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of many public-company CEOs who are so ham-strung by disclosure regulations, they can hardly say anything that's not already widely known.  

    2. For more on the mobile banking debate, see our latest Online Banking Report, "Mobile Banking & Payments" (OBR 138/139 here).

    3. Disclosure: Mr. Crone has been an occasional contributor to our sister publication Online Banking Report. His first article appeared in our 1996 issue.

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    Links from My ABA Presentation

    By Jim Bruene Posted on
    Categories: Conference Calendar, Website Usability & Design

    As mentioned yesterday (post here), I participated on a panel entitled, Extreme Online Makeovers, at the American Bankers Association National Community Bank Convention in Palm Springs. 

    Presenters included:

    • Clay Morgan, creative services manager, Digital Insight
    • David Rubini, product usability director, Digital Insight
    • Richard Carlisle, CIO, Valley National Bank of New Mexico
    • The discussion was expertly moderated by the ABA's own Doug Johnson, senior policy analyst, American Bankers Association

    I promised attendees a list of the links used in my portion of the presentation. Here they are in order, along with my highly subjective letter grade of their homepage design:

    1. Upcoming.org upcoming.org: Web 2.0 design/functionality (A-)
    2. Wesabe wesabe.com: Quicken meets Zagat (A-)
    3. Billq mybillq.com: Award-winning bill payment tracker (A)
    4. Google google.com: Focus on what matters (A++)
    5. Bank of America bankofamerica.com: Good design, but too much clutter (A-)
    6. Wachovia wachovia.com: Not-so-great design, and even more clutter (C+)
    7. ING Direct ingdirect.com: Great design, no clutter (A)
    8. U.K. montage: smile.co.uk, egg.co.uk, alliance-leicester.co.uk
    9. Prosper prosper.com: Interesting new P2P lender with modern design (A-)
    10. E*Trade Bank etradebank.com: Great at selling key products (A)
    11. High-yield savings montage: emigrantdirect.com (A), hsbcdirect.com (A), mybankingdirect.com (A)
    12. Progressive Insurance progressive.com: Great comparisons to competition using scrolling summary of other users' search results (A-)
    13. NextCard: No longer online (A+)
    14. PayPal paypal.com: Task management built into the design (A-)
    15. Countrywide Financial countrywide.com: Integration with the phone channel (B)
    16. Wells Fargo blogs blog.wellsfargo.com: Look especially at the StudentLoanDown (A), which demonstrates how to communicate with a Web-savvy niche audience

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    Prosper Launches Group Ratings, Schedules User Meeting

    By Jim Bruene Posted on
    Categories: Conference Calendar, Loans & Credit, Prosper, Zopa

    Person-to-person lender, Prosper, announced its first annual user meeting next February in San Francisco. Registration is a refundable $25 and includes an all-day session with dinner on Monday, Feb. 12, and a half-day on Tuesday, Feb. 13.

    The agenda has not been published. Online signup is here.


    The October newsletter (see End Notes for screenshot) also announced the arrival of the group ratings, an important milestone for the nine-month-old service. Group ratings promise to help lenders locate borrowers with better-than-expected likelihood of repayment. If it works, Prosper could become a major force in consumer lending. If it doesn't, the company will have to find another way to beat the loan default odds. 

    For more information:

    • For prior coverage of Prosper and its U.K. rival Zopa, look here.
    • For detailed analysis of the market, see Online Banking Report #127 published in March

    End Notes (click on the link below to see Prosper's Oct. newsletters)

    Banner advertising at About.com's banking blog <bank.about.com>

    Bofa_ads_aboutdotcom

    Landing page for direct navigation to <bankofamerica.com/nofeemortgage>

    Bofa_nofeemortgage_url

    Landing page from bank's Google ad on "bank of america mortgage no fee"

    Bofa_mtg_landing

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    Two-For-One Offer to BAI’s Retail Delivery Conference

    By Jim Bruene Posted on
    Categories: BAI, Conference Calendar

    Update: The 2-for-1 offer is no longer available through this link. However, you can still save $350 ($700 for two) before Sept. 5 — enough for a snazzy new monitor for your desktop anyway. But first, check your inbox for an Aug. 2 or 3 email from BAI with the 2-for-1 offer. You should still be able to claim it with your promo code.

    Bai_rds_logo_1If your team is headed to Las Vegas in November to take in BAI's <bai.org> bank-tech extravaganza, you better jump on this offer before Sept. 5: two admissions for the price of one (main conference only). That will save you nearly $1,700, enough to put that new plasma display in the conference room. If you are going by yourself, you'll still save $350 with this offer.

    Here's the link:  http://www.bai.org/retaildelivery/

    –JB

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    Events Calendar

    By Jim Bruene Posted on
    Categories: Conference Calendar

    Upcoming conferences of note include:

    1. BAI's Retail Delivery, Nov. 14-16 in Las Vegas; the grandaddy of banking tech conferences featuring a massive exhibit hall and thousands of attendees from around the world.
    2. American Banker's Technology Forum, Oct. 11-13 in Silicon Valley; much smaller than Retail Delivery, but highly focused on online banking and payments issues.
    3. BAI also offers its Combating Check & Payments Fraud Conference, Sept. 25-27 in Baltimore, MD. The first day also includes the CheckImage Forum in conjunction with ECCHO.

    Click on the following link for the complete calendar through year-end:

    Conf_jun_nov_2006_5

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