One of my favorite innovation operators and a real champion of corporate Irving Wladawsky-Berger wrote about MMV in his blog recently. He also talks about working with Citi at large which is exciting and timely.
I have not been posting up here in the last few months because I’ve been working on a new venture (not to mention a new, walking 1 year old.) We announced today: Mobile Money Ventures, LLC.
So for the last 6 months, I’ve been cooking up a joint venture, spinout, between SK Telecom and Citi. Our focus is to build the mobile banking and payment experience that will define the standard for this emerging market. I am extremely excited to start on a new venture (it’s been a few years since my last start-up).
Here is the press release.
Now back to our regularly scheduled posting.
UPDATE: I will be at Finovate tomorrow. This looks like a great event and I will post photos and comments.
Jim Bruene of Netbanker fame has organized a much needed event in Finovate 2007. Speed dating for venture capital ala the DEMO conference. I am sorting out my attendance, but I know some other folks from my team who will be there. There also seems to be a dearth of tickets (sold out!).
On October 2nd, 2007, twenty of the most innovative companies in the financial, banking and lending industries will gather in New York to offer a glimpse of the future of mobile, personal and online finance.
The presenters are:
CheckFreeClairMail This is the type of event that we need to see happen frequently in order to support innovation in the financial services space.
Two of my favorite banking blogs have started discussing a topic that I also love to talk about, banks and blogging. Rob Findlay at the Bank Channel has posted regarding research by the Javelin Group indicating that blogging is the answer to the bank-to-consumer communication issue. Ron Shevlin who oversees Marketing ROI build further stating that banks better get into the blogosphere, and figure out how to do it right.
I have written about corporate blogging and specifically that corporations and banks need to get on with it as a matter of message control and participation in a hypergrowth channel for consumer interaction. I would add to it now that this channel is the de facto channel for topics that can be tagged as innovative. Imagine how much easier it would be for us to figure out the whole US mobile banking mess if we had been blogging with interested customers, partners, experts, whoever at the same time that we were discussing strategy, hiring consultants and having kick-offs internally.
From an organizational perspective, the value that interaction with senior management generates, particularly among those who have no traditional avenues to do so, is routinely underestimated. I come across folks at Citi everyday who operate blogs in their free time and would love to do so at work, just for the exposure and the thinksharing. Most blog-related discussions at work inevitably come to the questions of “…what do we get out of this?”. Well, Banks have to turn a corner and believe that honest, open. two-way dialogue is the cornerstone of the new bank. This needs to happen with employees, customer, shareholders, constituents, regulators, competitors, partners…the list goes on. And as for the question of the ROI of blogging, I leave you with Nobel Prize and Oscar winning author George Bernard Shaw’s quote:
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
There’s been a bit alot of rumbling over the last few weeks regarding Amazon’s introduction of Flexible Payment Services to their already burgeoning set of web services. Not a surprise really, but strategically very key for Amazon to close the loop. Having already blazed trails in affiliate marketing as well as more specific service models such as the S3 modules for web services, Amazon has come in on the final piece of the puzzle of the modern commerce landscape they are shaping.
Obviously this is a basic dis-intermediation threat to banks (again) and merchant service providers, as well as a way to reduce costs on Amazon’s own transaction/interchange expenses. Banks can take heart in that rather than pursuing the Paypal model, Bezos and team have elected to go through the existing credit card networks for larger payments. Google Checkout uses a similar model but Amazon has put a bit more into the model. Look carefully and you uncover an Amazon branded stored value account as the crucial center of the FPS value proposition. Om Malik points out that the FPS strategy is a Trojan Horse designed to take share from Paypal. I would build on that by saying that FPS can start enable the holy grail of payments, the dirty little M-word: micropayments.
The pricing model that Amazon has prescribed for their service is a very interesting first indicator of the differentiation that Amazon FPS can provide to online merchants who are selling non-traditional goods. By differentiating ACH, association and stored value transactions into different pricing buckets, FPS provides access to all the major forms of payments as well as their own ultra-flexible account. The Amazon account is controlled by a truly groundbreaking set of rules that can actually enable new types of selling models. Merchant can charge periodically for usage, split payments to and from different endpoint accounts as well as aggregate micropayments without merchants having to “hold” onto transactions. These are just a few of the types of selling models that can be enabled that may have been cost-prohibitive before using the incumbents system.
The wildcards here are 1) Amazon is by far the most developer friendly in the “Big” web. 2) Amazon has 62 million active consumers with Amazon credentials (with credit cards on file) that can be leveraged by merchants using FPS.
To think, it all started as bookstore.
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