Author: Aden Davies

Friday Reading #4

The fourth installment is proving somewhat tricky to write as yesterday was our team Xmas do and I feel a little delicate. For this reason there may also be more spelling/grammar mistakes than usual but as one of the links below shows if you point them out you are a dick. A couple of proper long reads this week, the story on the Occupy movement being a particular highlight. There is also a link from wayback in 2009 that crossed my stream this week.  The links are all bundled up as an ebook links in an ebook. Enjoy the reading and I hope you never have to feel like I do today.

 

A Eulogy for #Occupy

‘We were trapped in endless war and financial crisis, in debt and downward spiral that our leaders bickered about, but did nothing to stop. It wore away at people with the implacability of geological erosion. The American empire we never wanted in the first place was crumbling slowly, and nothing we did in our lives seemed to matter.’

 

Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics

‘Now that I’m a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilisation, what do I think of Asimov’s belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier – that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny?’

 

Making dollars and sense of the open data economy

‘What I’m looking for now is more examples of startups and businesses that have been created using open data or that would not be able to continue operations without it. If big data is a strategic resource, it’s important to understand how and where organizations are using it for public good, civic utility and economic benefit.’

 

The Social Solution to Innovation Challenges

‘It’s not that social media gives businesses the real-time intelligence they need to work quickly. In fact, as demonstrated by the results of a study that Emily Carr University and Vision Critical conducted earlier this year, there’s every reason to think the opposite. Our study found significant differences between social media “sharers” and social media “lurkers” — differences that could lead a company astray if it took tweets and Facebook posts as indicators of what their overall customer base is thinking.’

 

Fake Rocks, Salami Commanders, and Just Enough to Start

‘So, just humor me. Think about something you’ve been really excited to make or do.3 Maybe something you’ve been thinking about starting for weeks, months, or even years. Dance lessons? Short story? Web comic?MAME cabinet? Tree house? Doomsday laser? Excel spreadsheet?4 What stops you?’

 

Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet

‘There was a time that it gave me a blush of pride to be referred to as “the Spelling Sergeant” or “the Punctuation Police”. I would gleefully tear a syntactic strip out of anybody who fell victim to the perils of poor parallelism or the menace of misplaced modifiers. I railed against atrostrophes and took a red pen to signs posted in staff rooms, bulletin boards and public washrooms. I was, to put it bluntly, really, really annoying.’

 

and finally…a splendid read about alcohol.

 

Last Call

‘England has a drinking problem. Since 1990, teenage alcohol consumption has doubled. Since World War II, alcohol intake for the population as a whole has doubled, with a third of that increase occurring since just 1995. The United Kingdom has very high rates of binge and heavy drinking, with the average Brit consuming the equivalent of nearly ten liters of pure ethanol per year.’

December 14, 2012 Add Comment

Friday Reading #3

The hat trick (hatrick? hattrick?). A mini milestone of three. It might be the longest I have ever stuck to something on a blog. I am still playing with the format of these things and have been wondering about keeping it just pure links and a teaser paragraph or adding a line or two of commentary about why I chose the article. I will stick the former for now though. The reason I pick these are because they are interesting and thought provoking and slightly related to my job mainly. Some pieces deserve more written about the why I chose them though so that is something I will dabble with in the future. I would also like to add in some accreditation for the people who passed these things to me. The authors of the pieces themselves and maybe some sort of rules i.e. I have a limit of ten links. Is that too many, too few, about right etc.

Anyway, shut up, here are some fine reads for your weekend. Readlist/ebook type thing is here for you alternative reading device fans.

 

Tim Cook’s Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks

‘Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we’re very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn’t one of those. A lot of companies have innovation departments, and this is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation or something. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door. (Laughs.)’

 

The Ups and Downs of Making Elevators Go

‘Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people’s rides longer.’

 

Life Online: The Biology Is Different

‘The idea that people who were otherwise constrained from movement or speech or action could have those constraints removed made my heart sing. The possibility that ubiquitous affordable access to connectivity, computing power and storage could soon become a reality fascinated me. The implication that billions of disenfranchised people could have their lives transformed, particularly when it came to health, education, welfare, filled me with glee.’

 

Wait A Minute Makers: Before Agencies Can \”make Things” They Need To Create “Makeable Ideas”

‘Creating things in our digital world requires experts in UI/UX and design, creative technologists and others who may not be part of the existing agency structure. It requires a commitment to the concept of “platforms, not campaigns.”‘

 

The Four Pains of a New Idea

‘Let’s face it. Some new ideas are worse than the old way. Attempts at innovating can be disastrous. The University of Utah bet its reputation on cold fusion and lost. Marconi bet the whole company on mobile phones and lost. Motorola bet $6 billion on the Iridium satellite phone network and lost. The Chinese state bet $30 billion on the Three Gorges Dam in China and has created an environmental crisis. Being new is not the same as being good.’

 

Starbooks and the Death of Work

‘The future never arrives. The future is always unevenly distributed, leaking out here and there as we poke and squeeze the present, as we invent new words and emotions to articulate contemporary experience. Gibson was almost right (he’d be right now, if you asked him again — hence the “endless digital now“)’

 

The Full Spectrum White Noise of the Network

‘I’ve always wondered what would have happened if we’d developed wireless networking first. If it had just happened to look easier at the time. An internet grown out of Ham Radio enthusiasts, rather than military hard lines.’

 

Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry’s Big Bang

‘ One of the games on the Magnavox console was a version of tennis.

“I thought the game was kind of crappy,” Bushnell says. Yet people were lining up to play it, “and they were kind of having some fun. I thought, If they can have fun with this shite” — Bushnell breaks off into a hearty laugh — “if it can be turned into a real game, that’d be great.” On the drive back from the demonstration, “I got thinking of ways it could be improved.”’

December 7, 2012 Add Comment

Friday Reading #2 (Saturday edition)

Only my second attempt at this and I am already late courtesy of two chaotic days at work. Lame excuses out of the way here are some fine reads from this week. A thrown together readlist/ebook version also exists if your are tab read lazy like me.

 

The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

‘When the information superhighway arrived on a wave of hype, there was good reason to be sceptical. Dialup computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) had been around for a decade albeit with limited adoption from enthusiasts. The French version of Prestel, Minitel, had only reached its wide audience of about 9 million homes because the French government had subsidised the terminals. The internet remained just as expensive, at UK dialup rates, as the marginal BBSes.’

 

Microsoft Has Failed

‘Microsoft is largely irrelevant to computing of late, the only markets they still play in are evaporating with stunning rapidity. Their long history of circling the wagons tighter and tighter works decently as long as there is no credible alternative, and the strategy has been the entirety of the Microsoft playbook for so long that there is nothing else now.’

 

Why People Really Love Technology: An Interview with Genevieve Bell

‘The different trajectories of technology adoption the globe over. We don’t do a good job of tracing the genealogies of technology, and I think when you start to trace those out, you see these interesting threads that are deeply cultural and historical.’

 

Designing for the social customer

‘Whenever you’re designing products and services for the customer, start with the question:

Will this help build trust between the customer and the company?

If the answer to that question is No, then everything else doesn’t really matter. Just icing on a cake that no customer wants to eat. No customer, no business.’

 

‘I Am A Brand,’ Pathetic Man Says

“It’s sort of like I’m the CEO of the company called ‘Me,’” continued the sad excuse for a man, briefly pausing to check for any comments on his latest Tumblr post about the future of social media.

December 1, 2012 Add Comment

Friday Reading #1

I would like to think of this as an innovative reimagning of Martin Belam’s Friday Reading posts but as you can see it is a blatant copy. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery etc. Anyway, I am using this as a way to get back into the habit of more regular writing and also a way of focusing on the links I habitually collect but sometimes neglect i.e. never get around to reading.

So here goes Aden’s Friday Reading List #1. A collection of long(ish) form links on technology, innovation, banking and anything else I deem interesting enough to include. These links are also available in a handy readlist that you can send to your favourite digital reading device.

 

‘How to get startup ideas’

‘Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field “live in the future.” Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future, then build what’s missing.‘

 

‘Why Your Company Needs A Full-Time, Idea-Killing Chief Dissent Officer’

‘To paraphrase the scientist Jacob Bronowski, no society or organization died from this kind of dissent, but plenty perish from conformity. Every company could use their own dedicated objectionists–confidently criticizing what others didn’t feel empowered enough to speak up about.’

 

”How To Disrupt Yourself’

‘Most companies have built up significant barriers to innovation.  Culture, strategy, internal processes and the needs of existing customers all conspire to stave off ideas about doing things differently.  Therefore, the question every organization needs to ask itself is the following: If someone came to you with a breakthrough innovation, how would they sell it?’

 

‘Frog Creates An Open-Source Guide To Design Thinking’

‘Brainstorming, whether you believe in it or shun it, is a fantastic neologism. But as Frog Principal Designer David Sherwin has found, it’s also a very American word–one that doesn’t exist in every language. “We were in Bangladesh, trying to translate the idea into Bengali,” says Sherwin, remembering a recent trip his team spent working with teenage girls on community issues. “One of the translators on our team wrote up on the board, brain + storm. It couldn’t be translated.”’

 

‘5 Levers of Behaviour Change’

‘Any time an innovation is introduced to a group of users, it requires them to change their behavior. After all, innovations are by definition “new.” And with this newness comes change.’

 

‘Open Data: Is there a business case?’

””If [you open your data] you can change the rules to expose your competitor’s internal contradictions,” Taggart said. “Most big, fat secure companies don’t have the confidence to disrupt themselves.”‘

 

‘Data Bartering Is Everywhere’

‘Noam Bardin wanted to expand the reach of his company’s mobile mapping app to South America. It was a bold idea, but an expensive one. So over the past year, Bardin, the chief executive officer of Palo Alto-based Waze, met with resellers of geographical mapping information and asked them for access to their proprietary data. The catch: The Israeli entrepreneur said that he didn’t want to pay a dime to get it.‘

 

‘Apple and Twitter’ 

‘My friend and co-worker Tom has a thesis about Apple’s biggest problem: Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.‘

 

‘Twitter, Apple and Scaling’

‘The atmosphere at Apple was poisonous. It was a very heavy top-down management style. My own personal experience of it was short and painful. Decisions by senior staff (yours truly) were questioned by people higher up who didn’t really have trust in their employees. Twitter is completely different. Employees there are treated like grown-ups. Decisions are owned by whoever decides to make the decision. If someone says “Hey, we should do X,” the response tends to be “go for it!”

 

‘Alone Together, Again’

‘I owe my life to technology.

I first realized it in my early twenties. Everything important around me at the time, I’d found on Craigslist: my girlfriend, my job, my apartment. It was a powerful realization: I could sit down with my laptop and, in a matter of hours or days, change my world in both superficial and fundamental ways.’

November 23, 2012 Add Comment

People sharing photos of cards online are not idiots…

…they might just be your increasingly rare fans.

A few weeks back a new service started on twitter. @NeedADebitCard collated all the finest photos from the Internet taken by people keen to share their debit/credit card details and design with the world. The instant reaction to this by most sane individuals is ‘what are you doing you idiots?!’ Banking fraud departments across the globe probably tutted and cursed and then smiled as people proved what they already assume every day, the weakest link in online security is the one between the chair and the screen. Online commentators had a field day spouting off about the obvious dangers of this. My initial reaction was the same for about 5 minutes then I realised that these people are just using social media for its greatest use case, sharing everything. They might not be your most stupid customers but your most loyal, your most proud and in these current times banks need all the fans they can get.

The problems associated with sharing photos of your plastic payment device are actually the making of the financial institutions themselves. The Internet has been with us for 20 years. Social media in its current very easy to use incarnation probably 5-7 years old. Payment cards have been with us since the 60s and in that time they have not really changed a great deal. The bottom line is that they are not really fit for use on the Internet.

Outdated payment methods

These physical tokens of my relationship with a bank contain almost every bit of information a person needs to make card holder not present purchase from the web or via the telephone. The industry has tried to bolt on solutions to alleviate this problem e.g. the 3 digit security number on the signature strip (No one is idiotic enough to take a photo of the front and back of their card are they?) but you enter these details into a site every time you need to pay, effectively giving away the keys to your house every time you buy something via remote channels. Should the sites we buy from do more? Do ecommerce sites have PCI DSS compliance badges that they share with pride? ‘We keep your data safe’. Maybe the site owners should take a smiling photo of themselves holding their PCI DSS compliance certificate and put it on Instagram. Of course there are numerous protection standards in place around ecommerce sites I am being a tad facetious to make a point.

What of other solutions such as the universally loved 3D secure methods like Verified by Visa and Mastercard Secure. Yes they stop a certain kind of fraud but how many purchases are cancelled because of these things? How many swearwords are uttered when asked for an infrequently used password? What we need are payment methods designed for the web, designed to be used for one transaction or that just leave the merchant knowing who I pay via but not needing every single piece of detail to make further purchases.

I mean why do credit/debit cards need my full name printed on them? This is about digital identity and you would do well to watch Dave Birch’s recent talk on that subject. Dave is a man who signs his card transactions Carlos Tevez so he knows when people are trying to make fraudulent purchases. 

Social objects of banking.

(Bank) simple have just started sending out invites to their long time registered straining at the leash future customers. The effort and design they have put into their card will mean you will be seeing a lot of photos of these cards over the coming months. They had the foresight to package the cards with a thick blue rubber band holding the card in place but also to obscure the card details making easy to photograph and share the fact they are now proud (bank) simple customers.

Simple realise that the card is an important social object of their customers relationship with them and they wanted to make sure as many of them as possible would share that fact. They also realize the risk and warn their customers accordingly (while still encouraging unboxing photos) Traditional banks would not want you sharing the fact you bank with them online for fear of things like spear phishing yet one of the most used metrics in bank satisfaction is ‘Would you recommend your bank to your friends?’.

I have written about the social objects of banking in the past and I think they are massively underused in an industry that makes talking about your banking relationship and money in general seem massively taboo. This really should not be the case.

Idiots?

So before you go jumping to conclusions about customers who post pictures of their cards on social networks, think long and hard about why they are doing this and why in 2012 the details needed to make a payment online are printed on a small piece of plastic that everyone can see. Who are the real idiots?

This post origianlly appeared on Finextra http://www.finextra.com/community/FullBlog.aspx?blogid=6779

July 23, 2012 Add Comment

Burdened by ideas

*SOUND THE NAVEL GAZING ALARM* While writing my last post on PFMs I was struck by how certain ideas and themes recur in my writing and thinking. I am starting to get the feeling I am burdened by these ideas. My brilliance is being hampered by these synapse occupying visions of majesty so much so that my humility has been diminished. Self mockery aside the real reason they are a burden is due to the lack of progress I have made with turning them from ideas stuck in my head to anything resembling reality. I wrote about the problem with ideas stuck in my head last year and one of the ideas I will talk about in this post is one of the ones I refferred to. In that post I said I wanted to protect the idea:

[I] feel a need to evangelise this idea and to ensure it is not crushed by the design by committee types or overlooked as just a feature that can be dropped.

It of course got killed. For this and other reasons I have decided it is time for me to publish these oh so burdensome ideas. Be rid of these foul demons in the vain hope that someone agrees they are good ideas and has some sort of vision of how to make them reality. These ideas are of various ages and I think this list is probably in oldest first order.

 

Identity – Clearly this is a huge topic and I am interested in all facets of identity but the bothersome idea I have harboured for several years is why can’t I logon to my bank website? Yes I can log on to Internet Banking but that is different. For most banks the website is a completely different entity to its online banking portal. If I want to save a quote, view the terms of my insurance policy and potentially view my balances I should not need full strength security and validation. All quite subjective with regards to how secure different types of interaction should be but access to some forms of interactions need to be simpler (it could be argued that it’s the customers choice as to what level of security they desire). Also you have the whole personalisation angle (only show me adverts for relevant products, paint the site black if I am a certain grade of customer etc) to this but I am not so interested in that.

Some banks operate other logons on their websites or external parts of their site such as the logon for HSBC’s Advance offers  or the first direct lab. I suspect interactions here are not well linked to customer profiles or CRM systems because of these logon issues. They also require yet another user ID and password which everyone loves.

What about non-customers visiting a banks site? Why not have a level of registration/identity to allow people to research products, begin applications and then once they take out a product you can upgrade the logon to a level that allows more secure transactions? Don’t make me fully authenticate for everything and don’t leave tracking to cookies and chance for everything else.

Clearly identity is a much bigger thing but I don’t want to get into all that NSTIC / Digital Asset Grid type stuff just yet or even the connection of social network identities or the thought of Klout scores linked to product offerings (shudder). I just want basic federated logons for bank websites and any 3rd party sites the bank operates.

 

Notification Systems – I have written quite a detailed post on this idea a while back. The bottom line is that in banking today there are many types of events that occur but very few of those events are subject to any form of tailored notification to me as a customer especially if they are not financial transactions. If a specific transaction arrives in my account can I be notified via SMS? If my account balance drops below a certain limit can I get a DM on Twitter? If I miss a call from my RM can I be notified via email? If my mortgage application progresses to the next milestone can I get a message sent to my Internet Fridge? If someone tries to logon from a country or using a device that is not mine can you alert me via every channel available? (why don’t banks have an audit trail that the user can see showing their logon activity ala Gmail?) Today the notifications available to customers are fairly limited. Maybe some basic SMS or some notifications inside a mobile app. The tailoring of them is also limited. No creation of rules or choice of multiple notification channels.

Not only does this limit the amount of feedback loops a bank creates it means the banks miss an opportunity to engage with customers. This thing has happened with your product…you should take some action (and hopefully see this advert for new stuff).

Over and above this though is that these notifications and these events that have occurred are fuel for other services both inside and outside the bank. Imagine if your bank had systems that played together nicely in ways you could manage. Imagine if you had the equivalent of If This Then That for your bank(s). The events and notifications are ripe for bringing your bank activities into your digital world rather than keeping them all locked away in an internet banking portal.

 

Activity Streams – (This is kind of the one referred to earlier that got killed off) Basically these are a well known form of viewing data and capturing specific forms of interaction. The Facebook newsfeed is probably the most well known form of activity stream. A flowing river of events that have occurred in your network. Why isn’t your bank relationship represented like that? Today it is split by account, then drill down into a list of transactions. That view is of course important but it shows little of the actual interactions. Why not have an activity stream of all actions across all products and services? For example why not show entries such as;

    • You called today and we have done the following things
    • You left a comment on the first direct lab
    • You have won a prize for being our bestest customer
    • We have replied to your complaint about your prize (See our response)
    • We tried to cold call you but you ignored our call
    • You have been chosen for a fantastic new marketing promotion
    • etc

These would be interspersed with the far more frequent and familiar account transactions but it shows you everything that happens across your relationship with your bank. This representation may also change the way you present transactions as more data could be added such as geolocation, images of cheques, call recordings, 3rd party offers etc

Activity Streams are also a blossoming open standard.  You can post events in the activity stream format and then build a stream of those events across any service. If all banking relationship notifications/events mentioned in section two were formatted into activity streams it would allow those events to be brought together more simply in a single place, easing front end integration but also should you so desire allow you to share them outside your bank. This presentation by one of the contributors to the Activity Streams standard, Chris Messina of Google, explains them brilliantly. What if banks extended the standard from it’s current social network definition? A bank contributing to open standards? Crazy talk…

Again this idea is about linking things together. Bringing events from a multitude of systems into one stream. Also enabling the linkage of bank events into wider world of web services.

 

Open Data & Application Programming Interfaces –  This is my current brain occupier. The one thing I would like banks to embrace the most. I have written about these things many times both inside and outside of the organisation I work for but like Robin S said ‘words are so easy to say’.  I wrote about them here, here and here.  Basically what I want to see is banks surface APIs for core functions. An API for my transactions that I could plug into other services ala Freeagent, An API for payments so a developer could code an app to send money to people ala PayPal X Commerce etc. The very smart James Governor said a while back that he believed API creation and management will be a core skill of the successful enterprises of the future. He is right. We are starting to see a bit of a groundswell around financial services APIs, albeit mainly from new entrants. That will change soon hopefully as the banks wake up to the potential of bridging the gap between the bank network and the web.

Open Data is very similar in that instead of publishing services it is about publishing things that have happened. Banks should have some cracking data sets that could be shared for the benefit of others. Not least the hackers and tinkers and visualisers etc. If the World Bank can do it (and do it well) why can’t some of the other banks of the world do it?

 

Conclusion of sorts – The main themes here are related to some sort of connective tissue of banking and the web. You can tell I am not a TOGAF certified architect with those kinds of descriptions. I am always disappointed when something can’t be connected to something else for what ever crappy reason ‘It was too expensive to build it like that’ ‘IT Security wouldn’t let us’ ‘It was planned for phase 2’ ‘Open standards are a legal minefield so we write better ones’ ‘What the hell are you on about tubby?! Only activity stream you need is to go swimming’ etc

I understand these things are potentially major infrastructural changes and there is also an unhealthy dose of mindset changes required as well. Both these things notoriously complex, challenging and expensive. I have no mind for business models or numbers related to these kinds of things so could not put a price on such a thing.  I suspect they will cost a fortune to build but will they deliver the savings needed to justify them? Will they allow innovation and creativity to flourish in the way my Utopian visions say they will. Who knows? I believe they will but who will believe me without Return On Investment numbers and other dull figures of justification?

My failings (of which there are many) are that I don’t really know how to make things/make things happen (this could be a whole new navel gazing post). I know how to do whiny blog posts and sarcastic presentations and that ain’t working so well for these kinds of ideas (I am being  flippant but I really don’t know how to start these things). Obviously a problem shared is a problem halved so this is my attempt at that.

Be Gone. Maybe it is time to drown the puppy. Arrogantly accept the fact my ideas are clearly far too ahead of their time/not in anyway realistic. Move on. Seek out new ideas in new areas far away from these and rid myself of this (not very heavy) burden. This is the first step towards that…publish away my problems. I will of course be right back to them the moment anyone shows the merest flicker of interest because I suspect the only real way to rid myself of this burden is to see these things, or better solutions, implemented.

June 7, 2012 2 Comments

More Problems With PFM

This post originally appeared on Finextra. It is my first post there and is an attempt to put me and my half baked thoughts and ideas under a bit more scrutiny. I have reposted it here so I have a copy on my own personal blog. 

I love online Personal Financial Management tools. These web based services which allow people to visualize and manage their financial lives in one place, using pretty graphs to show where their money goes, set budgets and alerts, have shown how money should be viewed and interacted with in a richer way than most banks currently provide. The problem with them though is that getting data into them, certainly in the UK, is a real pain in the…

First a bit of background, Personal Financial Management tools need data to exist. There are a number of ways to get this data;

1. Users manually download data from their accounts to a file in a recognized financial data format e.g. Open Financial Exchange (OFX), and then upload to their online tool of choice.

2. The tool scrapes the data from the bank i.e. a script logs on for you and downloads the data, this involves handing over your password and logon and probably invalidates your account’s terms and conditions. If your bank uses a physical device to generate an access code as part of the logon then scraping will not work.

3. You are lucky and live in a country where banks provide some sort of automated feed directly to your PFM from the bank, such as Germany. No need to handover your full logon details to Internet banking just authorization for a data feed. Your postman does not need a key to your house to deliver a letter.

Clearly option 3 is the most convenient from a user point of view and is also much more secure than option 2.

In the UK none of the high street banks currently provide automated feeds from their personal current accounts. Nationwide used to have an OFX server running but I believe it was switched off a few years ago. Because of this lack of automated data feeds the UK PFM market is pretty stagnant. Kublax closed down a few years ago. Wesabe partnered with the Telegraph but to no avail as they also closed their doors soon after. Mint have threatened to launch in the UK many times but I have still not seen a date. There are some still running of course, Love Money, Money Dashboard and Money Toolkit being fine examples of the genre but I have a feeling their usage remains niche due to the issues with getting data into them as highlighted above.

On the business side of things the situation is a little better with automated feeds for HSBC (my employer) working with Xero and Barclays recently announced an automated service with Freeagent. The problem is that these are both bespoke implementations, much like the automated feeds from banks in other countries which vary by instituion. In Germany they are lucky enough to have the FinTS/HBCI system which is an attempt at a standard protocol and delivery mechanism but from my conversations with people in Germany it is a little elderly and not implemented consistently across banks. I think it is pretty safe to state that for the majority of the financial services world no standard exists today for the automatic feeding of any transactional data to the web. This means for the majority of users we are left with the hardly enticing choice of either manual and onerous data uploading or very risky data scraping options. 

Isn’t this a problem for the banks to fix?

Yes it probably is but I don’t believe there is much chance of use seeing all the banks in the world coming together in the next few years to agree a standard form of automated data exchange with web services, to be primarily used by PFMs who they see as competitors. The fact that the banks would benefit from these standards themselves as it means they could pull in competitor data into their own online banking services but I think the number of perceived issues prevent this from becoming reality. Reasons such as fear of the data feed being a security risk that would attract crackers from far and wide, the thought of transaction data being plugged into places that could lead to non-regulated financial advice being or more accurately the handing over of valuable customer data for others to mine. There are many implications to opening up a customer controlled data feed from banks.

As customers demand more from their online financial interfaces the desire to connect their tools of choice with their financial data is increasing. The banks that are smart enough to realize this is an enticing interface for some customers will perhaps offer some feeds but will they get behind an open standard that all banks and web services can use and integrate with? I can’t see it happening anytime soon due to the complexity of the banking industry let alone the perceived threat to competition from new entrants.

What about the Government? There is a chance in the UK that Government proposals may speed up the provision of standard automated feeds in the form of the MiData project, which aims to free customer usage data from various industries and return it to people for them to use as an aid to get better offers for products and services. I am a fan of the MiData project and what it is trying to achieve but Governments like Banks are not renowned for their speed to market.

This is why I think the future lays in the hands of the PFM providers and other financial services startups. They have built their tools on the open standards and open source code that the pioneers of the open web have built. Can they give something back to the web community and build some open standard financial data services? Build services that link to other services, for example could I use Mint and integrate it with FreeAgent?

Today we have a wealth of PFMs that have solutions for getting data in but they are not so great at sharing that data outwards, like the banks, so they are effectively just creating a single layer on top of the banks when I think they should be joining together to create an ecosystem, an ecosystem that the banks would find it increasingly difficult to ignore.

We see more and more new PFM tools enter the market every year and I think we are reaching peak PFM. An ever prettier array of pie charts, graphs and budget calculators offering similar functionality but all bound by the issues of getting data inside them and no real integration between them.

What I would like PFMs and other financial startups to focus on is a wider ecosystem otherwise they are just making new silos; we have more than enough of those in the banking world. Today Yodlee is the major player in this space due to the fact they have integration and data feeds from the largest number of banks. If a standard for data distribution were put in place then no one player would have the upper hand, be that a bank or an aggregator. Is it not in the interest of the wider PFM market to come up with open standards?

Where are the open standards in banking?

There does seem to be a lack of open standards in banking that can be used by the wider world. There are standard formats for financial transaction data, such as OFX mentioned above; the issue is that there are no standards for moving that data between banks and the web. The OFX consortium did provide a client server method for the transfer of data but the world has moved on and newer methods are required. Whatever happened to OFX? Could someone resurrect this?

The web for me is better when we have smaller things loosely coupled and backed up with a lovely dollop of open standards. Where are the open source initiatives around financial APIs?

The big players in the PFM market are readying their app stores and development platforms. Yodlee’s platform announcement was reporteed recently on Finextra, and Mint are also planning to make their APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) public soon. This is a great thing as it will allow for ecosystems to flourish. My only concern is that we are potentially building powerful single players. Will these new APIs be compatible with each other? Will data be in the same format? I hope they will.

Old world or new world?

PFM tools have shown the traditional financial industry how to display information about money on the web. They have given people more insight and control over their money. I think it is in their hands to show how data about money can be part of the wider web and not just locked in silos. I think they can show the way with standardized automated feeds that can fuel a wider ecosystem that will benefit people further in how they interact with money.

The banks can and should play a part in this. They clearly hold the keys to the data and may be reluctant to let go but I think it is in their interest to do so for the benefit of their customers as well as themselves. Making themselves a key part of this new ecosystem not only shows they are willing to open up it also shows they understand the web.

So, who will fix the problem with PFM?

May 8, 2012 Add Comment

Tweetbot: Fix these things and I will love you more.

I recently switched from the official Twitter app for iPhone to, the highly recommended by several of my friends, Tweetbot. I have to say I am very happy with it apart from a couple of things that I would love them to fix. They are fairly minor in my mind but I know app development is never straight forward.

I spend quite a lot of time on trains. These high speed (?) rail bound metal tubes are not renowned for their high quality 3G signal in the UK. Trying to catch up on tweets is quite complex when you have patchy signal. I grab 200 tweets from the API at every signal opportunity to give me something to read. I use the favourite option to mark things to read later. While on a train trying to open a web page (even in the excellent readability mode on Tweetbot) is next to pointless and wastes a squirt of precious 3G connectivity. Tweetbot will not let  you mark a favourite in Twitter while you have no signal. For the screenshots in this post I have set the phone to aeroplane mode to demo no signal before any smart asses say anything.

This is a better situation than the official iPhone app which tells you it has favourited them but when you go to your favourites when you are back in a high signal area you find this was a lie (on of the main reasons I switched to Tweetbot.

Why can’t I mark a favourite while I am offline?

I see it working like this. Mark the tweet as favourite as normal. Get a message saying the tweet has been favourited in offline mode and will be updated when a data signal is available. The app could either attempt when a signal does become available or perhaps move the requests to a folder in a similar fashion to the drafts folder. I can then see what I have attempted to favourite and reattempt to save them.

Favourite Fail

Favourite Fail

Surely capturing the favourite is as simple as storing a draft unsent tweet? Just store the Tweet URL (Is this allowed in an app/from the API?) and then resubmit the favourite call. Or maybe the app could even offer other options for what to do with the interesting URL within the tweet but the main thing for me is the ability to store interesting links when I am offline…but I digress.  The only solution I have today is cut and paste into something else or take a screenshot. Not great.

Why is there no visible notifications that I have unsent draft tweets?

Another downside of train travel is sending tweets when you have little or no signal. If it is unable to post Tweetbot will display an error then give you the chance to save or discard the draft. The problem being that someone forgetful like me will do something else and forget to send the tweet which was probably a reply to someone. Even if I go back later to tweet something there is no indication that drafts exist. The next time I find out I have drafts unsent is usually next time I am on a train and I have sent some tweets to the drafts folder and I do remember to resend and I find a bunch of replies from another time / day. Mildly annoying.

Draft fail

You only see drafts in the settings menu. I want a notifier please.

All I think is need is some sort of visual indicator on the compose tweet screen. Maybe a very simple red circle with a number in it, like the iphone notification number display, on the Tweet settings button. A simple reminder for the forgetful idiot, signal poor tweeter.

If you could fix these things Tweetbot I will love you more. Thanks in advance.

April 27, 2012 Add Comment

Banking in the ‘Glocal’ world

This awkwardly titled post is thusly titled because it is the name of an event that Betony Taylor, my esteemed colleague from the UK media relations team, and I were invited to speak at recently. The event took place in Zurich at the Swiss Stock Exchange and was hosted by Capco and the Swiss Finance Institute.

The venue for the day

The term Glocal (a portmanteux of Global and Local) is not just some awful marketing creation but is actually the basis of some detailed geographic research. The event was looking at the challenges being faced by banks due to the increasingly global nature of their customers through travel, the virtual erasure of borders through the use of the web and the realtime access demands due to the rise of mobile technologies.

The day started with a keynote from Peter Stringham of Young & Rubicam, and as it turned out he was also ex HSBC. His firm had undertaken a large piece of research into trust in industries. As you might expect the traditional retail and service industries had seen a huge decrease in consumer trust and the web based companies were seeing a great increase in trust. Peter’s research pointed to the fact that people just did not believe the messages coming out of those so called old world industries. I would like to see the research to dig into it a bit deeper but I have a feeling that people trust the big web companies more because what they do just works. They keep it simple.

The Occupy movement has been a big wake up for the financial industry. It is not just the normal protestors. Peter showed an image of a child protester to make the point that this will affect generations and how they think about banking. Recovering that trust could take generations. This lack of trust makes people want to disntermediate the system.

Occupy Bacon

An Occupy site just yards from the event

One example given was payments startup Dwolla. They want to do payments without touching the traditional bank network as much as possible. If banks continue to fight and defend against the Internet as people will try and disintermediate the bank network.

Peter also discussed the lack of cross border identity, even between so called global institutions. He mentioned Amex being particularly painful to deal with when he moved from Canada to the US. They explained that he was a customer of Amex Canada. He felt it was strange how they don’t brand like that. He moved to the US and had sold a house for ‘several million dollars’ yet had no credit rating in the US (at this point I of course had very little sympathy for him but I agree there is a problem). These problems are caused by regulations and a lack of really understanding the customer need. The companies that can best unsnarl the regulation will be the ones that win. Consumers don’t care about regulation, they care about being able to do what they need to get done. A great start to a day I was worried would be way over my head. It allayed my fears, albeit briefly.

The first panel focused on reputation management and followed on nicely from Peter’s talk. The general attitude seemed to be that the banks had taken their eye off the ball and the blind pursuit of money had cost them dear. They knew they had to engage at a more human level to regain what they had lost.

The second and third panels were way over my head the second panel was also way over my personal wealth. They looked at the future of cross border private banking and the regulatory environment and its effect on the Eurozone crisis. I will be honest, I did not understand a lot of what was said for about 90 minutes. I have looked back at the presentations and discussions and I am still none the wiser.

What those panels did however do is remind me of the scale, importance and complexity of the financial system. I tend to forget how big banking really is and there is nothing like a session on macro prudential regulation in relation to cross border private banking to make you think your obsession with this piddling little social media stuff might just be the banking equivalent of a child’s toy.

Are the banks stuck between a rock and a...

The panel Betony and I were involved in covered social media and new technologies (quelle surprise) It was preceded by a talk from Dan Marovitz of Buzzimi and once of Deutsche Bank. Entitled, Banking in the Digital Slipstream, it looked at how our actions on the web are ever increasing and as such so is the footprint of what we leave behind. This data is the new gold. Banks sit on an interesting set of this data that none of these web companies have access too yet. Are banks making the best use of it?

The panel discussion that followed covered these topics with a particular focus on transparency. How could the banks deal with the demands of social media and its incessant march against secrets. The consensus seemed that they had to adjust. My own point of view being that no longer can they hide behind complex business models and terms and conditions. I mentioned BankSimple CEO, Josh Reich, and his thought that banks make money by keeping their customers confused. I don’t believe they do that wilfully but I think that banks forget how complex banking is as they live in this bubble where they understand the terminology and the ins and outs. Amusingly no one in the room (except the panel members) had even heard of BankSimple so maybe I live in my own bubble as well.

On the wider topic of social media. I wanted to make clear that it is just a brand name. Just like web 2.0 before it and social business that follows it. It is just the evolving web, the twenty something year old all conquering web. We need to embrace it because it is starting to reach its true potential.  Earlier in the day social media had a few mentions and there was some confusion with it being about popularity and celebrity. Peter Andre was mentioned as doing well in social media but banks will not. Rubbish. The question was asked earlier in the day of how many companies are on twitter. This is the wrong question, how many of your named people are allowed on twitter to represent your brand. It is not about pumping out news on your brand in a broadcast manner it is about being a human being and adding some value.

I would love to see HSBC economists on twitter but there is so much regulation around them that they can’t say anything. They probably can’t even tweet about having a ham sandwich for lunch because that might impact the wheat and pork belly futures markets.

The panel moderator, Nick Levy of Capco, threw in his next question about dumb pipes, as in are the banks destined to become just a layer of infrastructure. I have written about this topic recently and the experience on the panel made me finish that long held post. In short I think yes they will but this is not a bad thing.

The view from the panel...enthralled suit based audience

Throughout the day I kept thinking about the levels of complexity on banking and how the evolving web’s great power had been to simplify processes and business models which has led to the rise of these new trusted companies, while banking and its many regulatory bodies and the governments of the world continue to add layer upon layer of rules and restrictions. I kept thinking about Clay Shirky’s piece on the collapse of complex business models. It is a fairly obvious yet pessimistic correlation to make. Yet the big trusted web companies are now starting to face the same problems, as Google’s recent privacy policy issues show. As the web giants encroach further on the ‘real’ world then rules and regulation are sure to follow. Will the new trusted companies be the ones that can innovate around regulation? Or the ones that unsnarl it and challenge the so called dark matter? Will the digital footprint be increasingly understood by consumers and will they realise the power it wields and demand that they have sight and control over it?

I don’t think the digital pieces of infrastructure required to really replace any meaningful parts of the banking system exist today. Digital identity and the elements of trust, systems that can eradicate the ability to hide money in dodgy offshore havens or through complex derivatives built on top of mythical AAA rated bonds. Transparency, trust and simplicity are the things required for banking in a Glocal world but they are very, very difficult to create. Ultimately a lot of these discussions around new technologies and trends and how you need to behave come down to good old fashioned trust. The day had come full circle.

All the presentations from the day (apart from Peter’s keynote frustratingly) are available here. There are some videos presentations and panels, although thankfully not the one I was on. Thanks to Capco and the SFI for inviting Bee and I to speak. It was a complex thought provoking day that reminded me exactly how big banking is and how it maybe needs to learn how to be small again.

April 18, 2012 Add Comment

Please stop calling them dumb pipes

Lots of people recently seem to be warning about banks becoming dumb pipes. They say banks are destined to just become the wires. The hearts and minds of customers will be won by the masters of the web. The Googles and Amazons and Apples and Paypals of the web 2.0 world. I agree they probably will but is it really a problem?

Those web 2.0 darlings are not going to make themselves into bank. The majority of them are just interested in the transaction data they don’t want the hassle of running a bank. Basel 3, MiFID and other impenetrable forms of regulation might not be too appealing.

Some may say (not me of course as I work for one) Banks have proved they don’t really get this web thing and especially not this web 2.0 thing with its rounded corners and nice fonts and helpful intuitive interfaces. Why not let the experts have a go at that bit while banks stick to what they are good at.

The banks operate a huge complex global network that moves trillions of dollars per day, usually without much issue. Complex fraud and anti-tax evasion systems operate silently. Audit requirements, data protection standards and a myriad of regulations make this system the powerful beast it is and also a potentially irreplaceable one.

No one in Silicon Valley or any other entrepreneur saturated dreamland is going to want to recreate the whole bank system (I have visions of mad stock sale billionaires from Facebook sitting in their volcano housed lairs thinking ‘we should do that’). That bank system may be a bit long in the tooth and may need some updates here and there but could we give it a chance to catch up by laying down some of these so called dumb pipes and bringing it closer to that other huge complex global network called the Internet? If we give a few more people access to the system in a web friendly way will it be of benefit to all? Will people realise the power of this network and what it allows us to do today?

Liz Lumley wrote a great post about SXSWi and how all the cool companies trying to disrupt banking are massively reliant on that network. ‘What struck me was the juxtaposition of the bravado coupled with the fairly shocking display of ignorance on how international banking and payments happen.’  These pipes are never going to be simple or dumb.

That being said I am interested in the most simple of these dumb pipes. I want an automated data feed from a current account. Every time a new transaction occurs I want a data feed I can subscribe to, just like RSS, to update. That feels very simple and you could say dumb but to make that happen is going to take some damn smart coding and some bravery.

The big problem is authentication. How do I prove I am who I say am? How do I prove that I am allowed to subscribe to that data feed? How does that authentication model satisfy banks security and fraud departments? How does it satisfy the regulators?  What would happen if someone had access to all the data behind that API? What if the Daily Mail had access?

The most simple implementation of the so called dumb pipe was planted in my head by Dave Birch. He posted the following tweet.

Setup a private twitter account. Plug it into your bank account (this dumb pipe of course has OAuth/XAuth like qualities). Follow it to catch your transactions as they happen. Now a bank would never build this. No revenue at all. It only presents risk but a customer has asked for it (albeit a quite forward thinking one who would be a guinea pig to embed payments chip into his body) but a customer need is a customer need and we know they are always right.

A few examples i have seen during my time at HSBC where customers are trying to circumvent this lack of a subscription data feed. Designer Aral Balkan was none too happy that he could only manually access transaction data from two months in the past. So he built a tool (in under 4 days) to scrape the data and save it in a format for him to upload to Freeagent. Another person, a smart gentleman going by the name Jay Fresh, went a step further. He reverse engineered online banking to produce a command line interface. I spoke with him and asked him why, his reply was that he had simply wanted to build his own iPhone app. I can understand his frustrations. Should customers have to work so hard to do this? Should they have to risk their own logon data and potentially break terms and conditions to try and get to the data? Banks spend pots of cash each year trying to figure out what customers want, why not give them the tools to build what they want. A so called dumb pipe would be a very powerful tool in the right hands.

Mr Bank 2.0 (soon to be 2.1 and available in all good book stores), Brett King, also wrote a great post on this topic (and has been talking about it for years) arguing that if the banks do become merely an infrastructure layer then they will miss out on the value built on top of it and that we may need fewer banks/infrastructure providers. I agree they might and there could be less banks but do we need that infrastructure layer to be created to allow new value chains (ugh) and innovations to truly flourish? Where would we be if we still had a fragmented electricity system? Or you could only call someone on the same telephone network as you? We need to create these commodotised infrastructural layers and allow them to weave into the wider world (web?). The innovation S-Curves of many technologies have shown this pattern. Banks may resist as the wireless telcos are doing now, except for the smart ones such as Telefonica, but I believe there is an inevitability and the banks that embrace this will be the ones that exist…but I digress.

So what would a banks dumb pipe look like? What are the technologies required to keep this mother of all honey pots safe and secure so it does not spring a sticky leak. What would be needed to build the simple sounding dumb pipe detailed above? Yes there is inherent risk on freeing customer transaction data but I think the potential benefits outweigh the risks (I may be alone on this). We are starting to see some things in the French banking market that might answer these questions SDK’s have recently been released by Crédit Agricole and this week has also seen the launch of an API by Banque AXA. The future looks French.

I look forward to the arrival of the dumb pipe. It will bring together the banking system and the web. I have high hopes for this dumb pipe. People need to realise that the pipe is not so dumb.

March 21, 2012 14 Comments