Finnovation

I really enjoyed the first Finovate Europe in London. We had an excellent couple of days, because we had BarCampBankLondon the day before (I’ll write something about it later), and lots of folk came in for that too.

Although it was in London, three of the UK’s four biggest banks had just one person at the event. Three of the others didn’t send anyone at all. Barclaycard and Santander sent six each. Hmmm. Perhaps the others are just being careful with taxpayers’ money. I wish the head of eBusiness from my bank had been there.

[From Some Observations From Finovate Europe | Forrester Blogs]

To be completely honest, I was looking at most of the presentations in horribly mercenary terms: asking only which of our clients might be able to exploit this? As a consequence, I wasn’t really grabbed by what one of my fellow delegates called the “wheelspinning” around personal financial management (looking at pie charts of your overdraft and that sort of thing). Our space is the secure electronic transaction space, so I enjoyed the presentations from our friends at SecureKey and VoiceCommerce. It’s that kind of thing that is hot, I think. I’m going to find out more about Miicard as well.

I liked the StockTwits presentation, which probably combined innovation in technology and innovation in business model in the most interesting way, targeting a specific niche in an engaging way. There’s a lesson for me here: if I used Twitter for something more than moaning about South West Trains, I could have been a contender. Boku were great and so were Ixaris: I understand what they are trying to do in payments and I’m sure that both of them will succeed. None of my picks made it in to the delegate’s top three in the final vote, but I’m happy to stand alone.

All things considered it was a super day, an excellent opportunity to connect with clients and colleagues, and an energising look around the space. Jim and all of the chaps should be very happy with it.

The presentation that I probably thought about the most after the event, though, was the one from Fidor Bank. They have integrated a variety of alternative currencies into their online banking platform. These are presumably attractive to German consumers fleeing the euro, with folks memories of hyperinflation pushing them toward non-fiat stores of value.

The partnership will enable Fidor’s customers to buy gold, silver, platinum and palladium without completing any GoldMoney application forms. Orders will be processed daily through the FidorPay Account at the bank and then placed with GoldMoney through an ‘Omnibus-Holding’ in the name of Fidor.

[From Finextra: Germany’s Fidor Bank to offer retail access to precious metals via GoldMoney]

If you want to find out more about GoldMoney, forum friend James Turk, their CEO, will be at this year’s Digital Money Forum. Although only precious metals are live at the moment, Fidor are planning to integrate virtual currencies the future. I didn’t get a chance to talk to them to find out what the mechanism for this is: as far as I know there’s no API for accessing your Everquest platinum (or, literally, a payments wizard) so it would have to be done using screen scraping with usernames and passwords, just as it is for other services with no security (eg, banking).

I’m naturally fascinated to see how customers respond to this. If you can shift from euros to gold to World of Warcraft gold in a simple and friction free way, then we might see some interesting markets emerging.