Category: Ideas

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

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

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

Please can someone improve Twitter lists

I have recently been creating a number of Twitter lists. These list are being created from spreadsheets of names that I then search Twitter and Google to see if they have a Twitter account. I then store the URL to the account in a spreadsheet against the name. I then create some lists in the spreadsheet. I then cut and paste the URL back into the browser and add the person to a list or lists. I usually hit the hourly API limit after about 70 entries.

This manual process is a fucking ballache.

Why is there no way to batch create Twitter lists from a list of Twitter usernames or URLs? What I want to do is to copy and paste a list of usernames or account URLs into a field, give the list a name and a description and then click a button to create the list. Also why is there no way to search for people based on their email address? I can get round this by adding email addresses to an email account and then using the find my friends option but this is extra manual work and I am lazy. These people may also not be my friends so it feels like a lie.

There are many other things I would like to fix with Twitter lists e.g. Why can’t I copy and paste between users? Merge lists? why can’t I manage them on the Twitter for iPad app? The bulk creation of them is most pressing. Anyone with some coding skills fancy knocking up an app to fix this?  It might be a good project for me to try and learn some coding skills but as previously mentioned I am lazy and I am also an awful programmer. Better yet Twitter people fix your functionality. I am willing to pay for this feature (Why are there no ProAm features?). Plea over.

November 28, 2011 Add Comment

If This Then That

The very lovely service If This Then That came out of it’s long beta cycle recently. The service is beautiful and simple in both its design and more importantly its  implementation. As the name suggests it allows you to create actions that occur if something else happens. These are the steps involved.

Click me.

You can create tasks based on triggers from a number of channels. The channels are the usual suspects of the social web

Channels have a selection of pre baked in tasks. Choose one and continue.

Then repeat the cycle for the ‘that’ element of your task.

You then have some more advanced options for the output. Here I am capturing a Twitter Favourite which contains a link to pass the link into Instapaper for me to read later.

Once you have created your tasks you can share them as recipes for others to use.

I love the simplicity and power of this site and what really got me thinking is the lack of this simple rules based operation in the world of banking. Some basic rules might exist for banks around simple notifications such as If my account balance drops below a certain level then notify me. This notification will no doubt be limited to a very small number of channels.

What if banks implemented not only the wealth of triggers shown in ifttt but the linkage to the many services that you already use.  Of course this would need some rather innovative APIs for the banking world with the ability to link outside the organisation and interact with the social web. I can but dream.

September 13, 2011 1 Comment

Social Networks or Data Repositories?

Last.FM, Flickr and Delicious. Three of my favourite sites that I use weekly if not daily. Use being an interesting word. I have scrobbled over 17,000 tracks into Last.FM, I have bookmarked over 5,000 URLs in Delicious and I have uploaded around 8,500 photos into Flickr. My usage of these actual sites though seems to be dumping and storing data. These once shining beacons of web 2.0 have been tarnished a little recently as they are surpassed by newcomers and/or left to stagnate by their corporate overlords. Maybe the reason for their lack of buzz/so called demise is that they are no longer really social networks but are becoming data repositories.  Maybe that is just the way I use them but I have a feeling I am not alone. Also is that a bad thing?

Each of these sites have social features built in to varying degrees;

Last.FM – Friends – people you follow, Groups – communities of users with similar tastes this then powers a radio station of those choices, Neighbours – People with similar musical tastes to you, Liked tracks allow you to share your love of a single track both inside and outside of Last.FM (strangely you can’t like an album but can share the album with social networks). With music what you really want is recommendations for new music and Last.FM does a pretty good job of this with its radio and recommended bands features.

Delicious – Allows me to see what the hottest bookmarks are right now, See which users saved the link, from a social point of view I can build up a network of users and then view what they are reading, I can also make bundles from that network (like Google+ Circles). I can notify my network about specific links but apart from that not much else from either a social or a discovery point of view.

Flickr – The Explore section has a rich source of content based on what Flickr decides is interesting to photos from specific places in the world. You can also create a network of contacts and see what they have been uploading at the Your Contacts page. There are also groups that can be created that typically bring together similar types of photos/photography.

Now I will admit that I hardly use any of the basic social features listed above.  I have had a little play but they fail to grab me. I have a small network of contacts on all three services but I rarely look what they have been listening to, photographing or reading. Not because of a lack of interest but due to the fact it is so hidden away.  I think there needs to be a specific call to action or event to visit these places. These networks don’t provide those either. They are just dumping grounds for data.

Timoni West, A designer at Flickr, wrote a wonderful post on how the most important page, the uploads from your contacts, on Flickr is failing. It lists some of the major problems with the page e.g. Inability to see all a contacts recent uploads, you have to visit a users photostream to see if you have seen all their recent photos.  There is a wonderful line in the post that I think sums up the missing social elements from all the services I have mentioned above:

‘The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away.’

When you return to a network/service you want to know what you have missed. You want to see what your friends have been doing while you were away. ‘What your friends are doing while your away’ can easily be curated and aggregated and displayed or shared on a network that you visit more frequently.

Another element that I think is missing from all three of these services are social objects. No great sharing elements exist from these sites to link activity to other more social spaces such as Twitter/Facebook/Google+. You can manually share a single or set of photos, like a track and share it wider or share a link from Delicious. The problem being that these things are again manual and the sharing of these things have been improved on by other services. Link sharing is obviously an integral part of Facebook and Twitter and as such sharing directly from source will win over sharing via Delicious as it adds a needless step. Sharing photos from Flickr is fine but other services are surpassing it. Facebook is the biggest photo repository in the world simply because you can tag your friends. They are all on Facebook they are not on Flickr. This is then shared into the users news feed. The fact you can’t tag Facebook friends on Flickr is a failing of the federated social web rather than Flickr but a problem for Flickr none the less. The most used camera on Flickr is the iPhone. The most used app on the iPhone is Facebook. You also have so many photo sharing services designed for mobile and designed to link straight back to Twitter e.g.  TwitPic, yFrog and Instagram being just a few examples.  All these things mentioned above are single entities, a photo, a link or a track.

Can these repositories offer something unique worth sharing? A call to action tailored to that user? The thing that data repositories can easily generate are stats. Everyone loves stats. Especially if they are in pretty graphs or in small digestible formats.  I think Last.FM are really missing a trick with stats. I use a service called tweekly.FM. This simple service looks at what I have listened to on Last.FM then tweets once a week my top 3 artists. It has lead to quite a few conversations about music. Many more than I have had because of Last.FM. How easily could Last.FM implement this service? Very. Could they offer much more detailed weekly/monthly/yearly stats pages? Yes. Look at their blog for some of the great things they can do with data? They just need to make that more personal and shareable. Another favourite Last.FM related service is LastGraph. This service creates a visualisation based on your listening history. Here is what I have listened to in the last 6 months.

LastGraph

Last.FM have some wonderful data as they cover on their blog but again it is hidden away (http://blog.last.fm/) Finally to get people visiting a music site how about giving people the option to DJ. Turntable.FM have done just that. A bit more interactive than the radio channels i.e. the person is on the site now spinning their favourite songs. Go and listen.

What about the photos? Well the current hot photo site is Instagram. An iPhone only social network built around sharing photos. They have 4 employees and 6 million users. The close integration with the service and Twitter has certainly helped it grow.  It has made photos social objects and I must admit I find myself visiting multiple times a day unlike Flickr where I only go when I have something to upload.  instagram recently launched an API and now we are seeing lots of interesting things being built on top. Just like Flickr when they launched their API. One great use of the Instagram API is Statigram. A beautiful set of stats/graphs about your Instagram usage. Shows data on your photos but also who you interact with the most. Instagram would do well to implment these kinds of features into their web app if it ever appears.  Flickr would do well to emulate this to beef up their own stats pages and make them more useful and shareable.

Statigram

These sites have all this interesting data about a person. Show them what you make of that data. Allow them to share what you have shown them about themselves.  Why not go one step further and allow them to create something physical based on all this data like the lovely Xmas Decorations that RIG made a couple of years ago.

I think these three sites have to accept the fact they are data repositories for most people. They have hardcore users who are highly active in groups. What they need is to convert more of the packrats into more engaged users. Allow the engaged (and the packrats) to link outwards to the areas of the web designed for social e.g. Twitter, Google+, Facebook. Bring people in and design rabbit holes to allow people to truly explore and decide how far they want to go.

I am not sure if being a data repository is necessarily a bad thing, there are plenty of business models around that. Some sites should just realise what they are and make the most of that fact.

Not really sure where this post came from it was just bumbling around in my head. It took me a while to finish and it made me think that my superficial use of these sites is not really the fault of the site but more my laziness. I want to get more out of these sites but they seem to make it difficult or is it the classic case of you get out what you put in (as long as you put in more than just data). The other thought that bumbled around was how does this apply to online banking. They are certainly data repositories and they certainly don’t design for sharing, discovery or making new connections. Along with Flickr, Last.FM and Delicious should they be doing more or are they fine as they are?

July 27, 2011 Add Comment

What are the social objects of banking?

I am on a train, I am not a fan of trains. Many people think the same. This is a very basic example of a social object. A simple yet powerful concept that can bring two or more people together to share and discuss their thoughts and experiences.  To make connections with people we try and put some context around the person to enable the conversation to start and hopefully flow  ‘Where do you live? I know someone who lives there. What football team do you support? I prefer the other team in that city.’ These are social objects and they bring people together. The concept of the social object was brought to my attention a while ago by Hugh Macleod who produces social objects in the form of his artwork. He also writes about them and I urge you to check out his work.

You will no doubt have seen his work in countless social media presentations ‘If you talked to people the way advertising talks to them they would punch you in the face’ and his most famous piece is probably Blue Monster where he challenged Microsoft to ‘change the world or go home’. His work is designed to be used in presentations and Hugh encourages people to print out his work and display them in their work space. He has a name for these things ‘Cube Grenades‘ little messages designed to say something about your attitude to work, life what ever to maybe act as a conversation starter (or killer). If you are richer than I then you can even order a nice print of them or if you are really rich/less of skinflint than me you could even commission your own work from Hugh.  I myself have had a few (unpaid printouts) displayed on my desk to give me a smile/little bit of reassurance on those dark days.  These social objects got me thinking about what the social objects of banking are?

Banking as it stands is a fairly private and solitary experience. Your financial situation is discussed with your nearest and dearest and maybe some experts on financial issues e.g. branch staff, an IFA etc.  Data about your financial life seems to be as private for some as your health records. Should this be the case? For some it will always be the case for others I am not so sure. We may discuss at a high level some of our financial lives down at the pub or over dinner. We may get given a great stock tip from one of our savvy friends or an in the know cab driver. At first glance there may not be much else.

Without a doubt the biggest social object in the world of banking at the moment is banker bashing. The financial crisis and its ongoing ramifications have made banks and bankers figures of hate. From constant coverage in the media of the bonuses handed out to ‘Those bloody bankers’ to the protests against them by groups like UK Uncut. The world can come together and discuss how and why they hate banks very easily.  While a lot of the action around the financial crisis is justified and needed to ensure changes and cuts do not go too far it needs to be made clear that not every banker is the same! Certainly when I tell people what my bonus was this year they are somewhat confused when they realise it is barely enough to take my family on holiday and that I am not ordering a new Lamborghini and buying a holiday home in the south of France. Another concept of Hugh’s is the social marker a way of adding context to certain social objects. It could be thought of as a statement that defines in its purest terms what the object is about. The financial crisis has a very powerful social a social marker which frames the conversation by realting it very closely to a person. That person is Sir Fred Goodwin. Fred the Shred. He is the ultimate social marker in this regard but do some social markers add too much context to an argument or frame it in a closed way e.g. tar us poor bankers with the same brush?

The other classic social object for banking is charges. People love charges. Love them. OK maybe not. The sharing of charges made by banks is again something that is needed to ensure what the banks do remains fair. Some charges are justified some are not and are onerous. Sharing publicly more about these charges can help people see which organisations charge fairly and which do not. This maybe an area that banks are not keen to get involved with but the world is a place designed for sharing so they need to get used to it and behave accordingly. The bank that most openly shares their charges may well be seen as the most thoughtful and caring bank.

The sharing of financial data from financial systems is notoriously difficult for various reasons such as it is deemed to be risky (rightly so) and organisations might not be so keen to share it with other organisations. In my opinion at some point the ability to do so will become common place if not even a regulatory requirement, as it is in Germany.  If we can make sharing of this data safer for both the customer and the organisation then the creation of social objects around banking will become much more widespread. So here are a few real world examples I have found on my online travels.

Blippy, a social network built around sharing what you had bought, recently declared they were on life support and were close to pulling the plug.  Sharing what you have bought is a classic social object ‘Oooh I love it I must also buy one! Dear God you paid how much for that?!’. I personally think Blippy died not because people were not keen to share what they had bought but because there was no safe way to do it (I have spoken before about the anti-password problem in banking) and because no one wants a social network just to talk about that one thing but if you input ‘I just bought’ into Twitter search I bet you get a high number of results.

BillGuard is another startup looking to get people to share what they have bought but instead of to discuss the item this time they want people to crowdsource safe/bogus transaction. Post a worrying looking charge on your credit card and people in the community can confirm whether they have also had this charge and are worried or other people can confirm what it is.

Instead of focusing on what you have bought the opposite is also a perfect social object, what you are saving for. SmartyPig in the US have implemented this perfectly.  A quick search for #SmartyPigGoal on Twitter reveals what people are saving their hard earned cash for. A list of dreams, desires etc. etc. Saving for my dream wedding or 2013 Glastonbury tickets. If you so desire you can contribute to your friends savings goals to help them on their way of reaching their goal. Now if that is not a conversation starter I don’t know what is. Or how about eToro Open Book a community that shows what currencies people are buying and selling the act of trading becomes a social object.

What about those in financial difficulty? The natural reaction maybe shame at getting into such a state but by hiding this away it can only make things worse. A problem shared is a problem halved. Money Saving Expert have created a fertile safe haven for people to share their debt situations and get advice from a community of strangers to help them out. By building a community around the saving of money from vouchers for money off to detailed guides on how to batter down the cost of your mobile contract or car insurance, Martin Lewis and staff have created the biggest, and most viewed financial community in the UK. The website alone is the most viewed site in the UK about financial matters. The forum is second. Third is the Financial Times. His weekly deals email is subscribed to by over a million and a half people. It is full of social objects. it is itself a social object.

Another form of social object is the person to person loan. Kiva provides a platform for people to request funding for small businesses in remote places. The social object is the desire for someone half way round the world to start a business. The other side of that social object is the desire to help someone out. I think the successful social objects around banking need to engender that desire to help or offer advice based on your own experiences.

HSBC ran a huge global campaign back in 2007 called Your point of view. Adverts splashed across the worlds airports, global press etc. featuring a set of images and a caption that worked on both images. Perfect conversation/thought provoking fodder.  It was backed up by the usual microsite (now sadly closed) but did not really capitalise on the social objects it had created in the fact that they were not easily shared and there was no easy way to have a discussion around them. That being said the campaign managed to be excellently parodied as part of a spoof edition of the New York Times to commemorate the end of the Iraq War so it was obviously shareable enough.  The Financial Brand did a nice writeup on the your points of view campaign.

Another example of things that organisations could make more of by making them social objects is the PDF report. Usually the byproduct of some glossy brochure/report that has been created with the primary function of being printed and sent to corporate or premium customers. Some of these are published online but just as PDFs and as such are not that shareable. A perfect example would be the recently published (and updated from 2009)  future of business report by my employers. You can find the document along with others on the HSBC Business Publications page. What more could this have been? What elements that make up this report could be social objects in their own right? What about the raw data could it be published and shared? And what about the interviews that made up this report? Surely the super cities definition and how they were chosen could be a great source of debate, I mean it does not have Sheffield down as a super city and as everyone knows this is incorrect. (Disclaimer: I may be a tad biased on the Sheffield front)

These are just a few examples of the kinds of social objects I have seen but I am interested in what social objects will continue to arise and what social objects people would like to see from banks? The advice given in Hugh’s piece is to be able to clearly define what your social object is. I am not really sure there is a definite social object for banking but looking at the verbs most readily associated with banking (spend, save, earn, invest, sell, advise, transact etc.) we can see where they might appear. So what do you see as the social objects in banking? Should there be more or should there be less? Should finance be a private thing best left to experts or something that should be shared and discussed on a global scale? Let’s see if this social object can lubricate some conversations.

July 5, 2011 5 Comments

The only Jobsworth worth listening to

Thursday the 5th of May saw a few folks from the organisation I work for head off to the Institure of Directors Hub near Liverpool Street to hear a Jobsworth speak at the Financial Services Club. Not just any old Jobsworth though, and not really a Jobsworth at all. The Jobsworth in question was actually JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce and the man behind the Twitter account @Jobsworth. I had been looking forward to this event for a long time, in fact a very long time as it had been cancelled 3 times due to JP’s hectic travel schedule and this event was almost cancelled as well. Thankfully JP agreed to speak even though he was suffering from jet lag having just returned that day from San Francisco.

The evenings host, Chris Skinner, gave JP a warm introduction and provided an overview of his background (Used to be CIO at Dresdner bank, ex Chief Scientist at BT and now of Salesforce) and why he was here this evening (because he has been providing fantastic insight and thinking around innovation, collaboration and communication for the past 20-30 or so years and he has a few things to share…he has a lot to share actually and is a big advocate of sharing as much as possible).

He began with a rather stark statement ‘People have the lowest expectation of valuable output in innovation terms from the banking industry’. JP was very sympathetic to the bankers plight around innovation saying that the ‘conditions inside the financial industry are very adverse’. I found myself nodding along wistfully…

The cheery tone continued as he discussed Clay Shirky’s thinking around the collapse of civilised societies and the causes.

1. Act of God
2. Overfarm the envionment – Strip it of all the natural resources
3. Ecological balance – The failed introduction of a new species making another extinct.
4. Collapse due to the society becoming so complex it would no longer function. The one most likely to happen to banks? Surely not…they are such simple and straight forward organisations? 😉

A great quote from Clay’s piece rings a few alarm bells

‘Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.’

With the scene set somewhere between depressing and suicidal, if you work in a bank, it was on with the show. JP had three themes weaved into his talk that I think were roughly broken down as disruption, communication evolution and designing for the loss of control.

Incumbents vs Disruptors. We started with communications disruptions. When ISPs began causing AT&T a major problem in the United States was when they started charging $20 a month for access to the Internet. AT&T the dominant market player, the one with unrivalled scale, owner of the majority of the actual network infrastructure found their actual cost to provide internet access was $28 dollars and that was without any profit for them.

Clayton Christensen’s work on incumbents was mentioned, specifically his study on the the fixed disk drive market. A classic case of a technology that the incumbents wanted to make cheaper, better, faster. A technology the disruptors wanted to in some ways destroy.

Incumbents are at a disadvantage in as many ways as they are at an advantage. With AT&T is was the layers and layers of business process, infrastructure that had built up over time and meant they had no way of reducing the margins. With the disk industry it was clinging onto a dying technology or sacred tenet. Disruptors may have high innovation levels with low performance/takeup/scale. This must still be seen as a danger. Hanging on to dying business models is just dumb but how many organisations are smart enough to see they are dying let alone that they should not be so sacred and are willing to kill them off? To truly innovate you have to challenge those sacred things. In big organisations this is near to impossible (especially in banks) ‘You can innovate over there in that area we don’t care about’ was direction that JP had been given in the past.

The word Bankrupt literally means a failure of trust, at what point does the lack of progress or innovation start to effect how much customers trust you? He finished with some scant crumbs of comfort ‘I have a great deal of sympathy for the people in this room’.


Communication Evolution. JP began by rolling out the fact that social media messaging volumes overtook email in September 09 (not sure of the source? Or what denotes social media messaging but the point still works). His youngest child has owned a Blackberry for 2 years. She does not subscribe to any email provider on the device. The Blackberry that most bankers carry almost singularly for the purpose of corporate email is being used by different groups in a completely different way. For his daughter it was all about group broadcast and presence provided by the Blackberry Messenger Service.

Half way through next year sales of smartphones & tablets will outsell both desktop and laptop PCs combined. Facebook continues to grow at a never before seen rate and only a fool would think it will not overtake the population of China (1.3 Billion) by 2020. How long have smart phones been on sale vs PCs? These forms of communication are growing at a rapid rate they are changing how we communicate and the language we use. How long did it take to stop using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and revert to ‘you’? How long to switch from you to ‘U’?


The iPad is only 13 months old, iPhone 4 years (and I think the Nintendo DS should be included in this) and a ‘2-3 year old child now touches a TV screen, not to put their sticky paw prints on it but becuase they expect some feedback/interaction.’ The physical household is no longer 4 or 5 people gathered around a TV. It is more like 6-8 communities. The average household has 6 Tvs, 3 PCs and 4 smartphones…

As technology becomes more advanced and available to ever greater numbers of people it becomes a means of speeding up evolution. With the continued compression of analog tools into smaller digital form factors such as the iPhone with its ever growing Swiss army knife of sensors such as the compass and gyroscope. The fact these devices are getting ever cheaper helps to accelerate the growth of innovation due to the nature of a reduced cost of entry.

‘Technology allows you to have claws or armour before you have evolved to have them yourself.’

Designing for the loss of control. This was the topic I was most looking forward to. It ties in to a lot of things that I believe and as such I was keen to hear JP talk after reading many of his posts on the subject. Designing for the loss of control for many still working in an environment that is locked down to the nth degree via things like the corporate desktop which JP likened to being the equivalent of being stuck with a bakelite rotary dial phone. He continued ‘God help you if you have to deliver to/from a locked desktop’ at this point I think quite a few people in the room were fighting back tears and reaching for the sleeping pills.

JP had recently visited Salesforce new acquisition, Heroku. The office environment was not your traditional one. ‘There were no desks, how do you design for a workplace with no desks? or no fixed wires?’ Do these locked down restrictive environments of banks lead to locked down and restrictive solutions being developed inside them? ‘If you design things that work only in a narrow alleyway then customers won’t go there’ or they will hate you if you make them go there.

Inside the banking world there are so many conversations around innovation. Meeting after meeting on innovation. Outside the traditional banking world innovation is just happening as people are just building, building, building. They don’t have the layers of process and bureaucracy. They also don’t have the other intrusions that bankers face…

‘Have you thought of the compliance implications?’ ‘No I have not thought about them at all…what do you take me for?’ A familiar sounding story from JP’s time at Dresdner.

To truly innovate you need to challenge these rules, barriers and constraints because innovation happens outside them. You will fail but you need to store those failures and use again in the future.

‘That’s not the way it works at our bank’ ‘Well good luck to you and see you in 10 years when your bank fails.’

And that is my recollection (limited by my note taking) of the event but there was so much more (Google prediction API used to see which employees work best next to each other and the work of George Gilder to name a couple). If you get the chance to see JP speak then take it. That being said for all the wit and wisdom of JP the best quote of the night actually came from my colleague Darren after the event ‘One of the best talks I have ever heard and also one of the most depressing’ said because he agreed with pretty much everything JP said and he knew we were pretty much powerless to do very much about the things that needed to change. Mr Rangaswami was right to have sympathy for us.

Thanks very much to Chris Skinner and all at the Financial Services Club for putting on the event (if you are interested in banking events like this you should probably join the FS Club). You should of course subscribe to the feed from JP’s blog and read it as often as possible as it just might stop you being such a jobsworth.

May 19, 2011 Add Comment