BENCHMARKING SOCIAL MEDIA - VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER - CROWDSOURCING - WORD OF MOUTH IN BANKING, FINANCIAL SERVICES, INSURANCE (B2C - B2B - B2B2C - WORLDWIDE)
Last night, I exchanged a few emails with Jon Gaskell - Co-Founder of Smartypig. Jon gave me the heads up and informed me of today's major announcements from the Des Moines-based leader in online goal-oriented social savings.
In my opinion, Smartypig is today one of the very best examples of gamification in banking.
Smartypig aka "The pig" is about to make several major announcements: a rebranding, a product launch, a new enagement model with an extended market -the whole worldwide financial services industry-.
Le theme de la gestion de budget, Personal Finance Management (PFM) en anglais, est l'un des themes les plus presents dans les conversations liees aux medias sociaux et a l'innovation dans l'industrie bancaire.
Mais peut-on reellement parler d'innovation? Peut-etre en France, certainement pas aux US.
NyKredit, Social Media, EFMA & PFM Back in 2008, Thomas and his teawm won the EFMA online banking award in Athens for their innovative and engaging WebDesk service.
This year, NyKredit was again nominated for the EFMA social media award for their 'Saving Tips' crowdsourcing initiative: in only 2 months they gathered 400 tips 100% user generated, without any reward strategy or contest. The contribution came mainly from facebook & mobile.
Please note that NyKredit will start a competition at the end of May with two major media brands in Denmark. They are also planning to integrate those tips within their PFM application...
Interview with Thomas Kragh, SVP Digital Channels Please find below my catch up interview with Thomas.
Agenda - Intro - User Generated 'Saving Tips' (00:40) - A positive story (01:52) - Reward strategy (02:18) - Leveraging that positive UGC (02:45) - Crowdsourcing: web design, mobile banking, online campaigns (03:21) - PFM on mobile banking (04:28) - Mobile adoption & usage (05:09) - What's next for their PFM tool (05:58)
Working Together We at Visible Banking would be delighted to help you and your team better UNDERSTAND and LEVERAGE social media in a strategic yet pragmatic way.
And what a day! Kudos to Jim Bruene, Eric Mattson , and the rest of their team for putting together such a smooth event with hardly no technical glitches.
16 Video Interviews I have been incredibly busy while staying in NYC. Indeed, I managed to shoot 16 video interviews between Monday 28th and Wednesday 30th September. I will be posting all of them on my blog soon. Stay tuned!
Interview #12 - moneyStrands: Atakan Cetinsoy, GM Personal Finance Products Strands does an excellent job providing intuitive online tools and 'people powered' applications. I love their focus on people, the end-users.
One of moneyStrands best achievements so far is to power BBVA's 'Tu Cuentas' online community. At Finovate they introduced their improved power search and their new partnership with savings.com to provide relevant online coupons and discounts to their users.
The Dynamic moneyStrands Team It was a pleasure to meet the friendly Strands team in NYC, and catch up with Anna a couple of weeks ago at the 2nd BarCampBank Madrid.
BBVA is one of Strands' investors and they had an exclusivity in Spain
until the end of November. Anna was busy in Madrid so stay tuned, I am
sure you will see more projects in Spain soon. moneystrands.es is now available.
Happy Birthday Aaron! I love this picture of you Aaron. Thanks again for flagging it on your facebook page yesterday: "Don't quite know how the media found this picture of me for my Business Network interview..." Perfect timing for my birthday post. ;)
Not only Aaron looks strong (cf the picture) and wears green most of the time, cnn labeled him a hero last year, he is a great guy to hang around with. I had the pleasure to meet with Aaron several times in the US and I look forward to catching up with him in London soon.
Aaron is a great inventor and also an outstanding entrepreneur a bit like his own hero Thomas Edison. He did an amazing job building in just a couple of years one of the most exciting, valuable, and successful services in the Online Finance world, Mint.com, recently acquired by Intuit for about $170 million.
Aaron's vision for Mint: turn the savings rate for people under 40 from negative to positive taking the pain out of budgeting. Budgeting made easy. Simple yet brilliant and so needed.
Mint.com: The Leader in Online Personal Finance Management In just two years, Mint built an active user base of over 1,5 million people.
Mint's Traffic Please find below the latest stats from compete.com.
Mint's Blog - 'Mint Life' This is another best practice in blogging this time. Aaron cleverly turned the Mint blog into an online magazine, one of the most valuable destinations for money tips online. It is now a profit center with many advertising deals in place.
The Mint.com Page on Facebook Mint has already over 38,000 passionate fans on its Facebook page. There is a lot of activity on the page.
Mint on Twitter @Mint has over 21,000 followers on twitter.
Mint's Money Tweets on Twitter Mint recently launched Money Tweet to keep track of valuable tweets for the Mint community.
Visible Banking Interviews 2.0 I invite you to check the list of my video interviews with some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs in online finance and the social media champions in the finance industry.
What a great line up: Michael Ferrari (smartypig.com), Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), Nichelle Stephens (KeepingNickels), Murali Subbarao (Billeo).
I initially got in touch with Michael when I was working in Innovation at Lloyds TSB, I had the pleasure to interview both Aaron (twice) and Murali at a couple of Finovate events in the US. I look forward to catching up with them, and meeting with Nichelle, in San Francisco at FinovateStartup09.
Mint.com adds One Millionth User Mint became the fastest-growing personal finance software ever, reaching 1 million users in just 18 months.
A quote from Aaron: "Our mission has always been to help people save and do more with their money. Our rapid growth demonstrates that an unprecedented number of people are finding real value in what we offer. And this is just the beginning. We will continue to enhance our service while expanding in new directions. In dialog with our users, it’s clear that there are still significant ways in which we can help Americans better understand their finances, and make better-informed decisions, with our innovative approach to personal financial management.” I invite you to read the excellent post "Three Principles of Personal Finance: All You Need to Know for Financial Success" Aaron wrote a few days before his consultation with the National Economic Council at the White House.
Smartypig Teams Up with Money Management Sites SmartyPig, the leader in the social banking space, today announced the launch of its OFX Solution, enabling customers to add their SmartyPig accounts into their preferred money management sites. The integration syncs SmartyPig accounts directly into online account aggregators, including: Buxfer, Microsoft Money, Mint.com, MoneyStrands, Thrive, Wesabe and Yodlee. Geezeo and Rudder are coming soon.
A quote from Michael: “At SmartyPig we recognize how important it is to securely manage your finances, set goals and help change the credit card mindset of ‘buy now, pay later,’ that has contributed to the current downturn. Being able to see all your accounts in one place is a critical step in taking control of your finances. We selected an OFX solution because it’s the most widely adopted open standard for exchanging financial information between consumers and financial services, and we aimed to grant this ability to the largest possible number of customers.”
I hope you have already bought your ticket for Finovate 2008 in NYC on October 14th!
In the meantime, I invite you to check the conference demo lineup announced on NetBanker two days ago. It is another promising line up from Jim and Eric.
* mShift <mshift.com> MShift is the leading provider of Mobile Banking solutions in the US.
It is a competitor of Drew Sievers' mFoundry. mShift is active online too, they help a few Credit Unions to launch a Facebook application such as Keypoint Credit Union (November 2007), and SEFCU Credit Union (July 2008). I hope I will have the pleasure to interview their CEO, Awele Ndili. Coverage on NetBanker
* Inner8 <inner8.com> Discover the power of 8 - 15/09/2008?
* LendingClub <lendingclub.com> LendingClub is one of the most popular social lending sites, with Prosper and Zopa. They did a big marketing coup when they launched the service exclusively on Facebook.
Management team: Renaud LaPlanche - Founder & CEO, Patrick Gannon - SVP Lending. It is not everyday that a Frenchman creates one of the most innovative startups, especially in the booming Social Lending space. Well done Renaud!
* Pertuity Direct <pertuitydirect.com> Pertuity Direct is a financial services company which aims to bring the next generation of social lending to the web. They will launch in September 2008.
* SmartHippo <smarthippo.com> SmartHippo.com is a vertical search engine and comparison shopping service for financial products. We are the first-ever site that uses the power of community to help consumers find the best finance rates and save money.
I am not sure if they are coming, but I look forward to meet with the Senior Management of the company, people like Luke Sontag - Co-Founder & President or Mitchell Savage - EVP (Mitchell presented at FinovateStartup for Confident Technologies).
To find out more about Vidoop, I invite you to check their blog.
* Wesabe<wesabe.com> Wesabe was the first PFM online community ever launched, back in 2006. It is one of the most innovative startups out there. The latest addition to their service was to offer the option to update your Wesabe account in "real-time" via the hugely popular twitter.
Marc Hedlund became CEO after Jason Knight stepped down due to personal reasons (Jason, we all hope August's condition is improving). Just like Jason, Marc makes himself available: you can contact him directly everyday at specific times. As far as I am concerned, they have the best Marketing/Comms team: Debbie, Allese, and Gabe, are doing a great job with the bloggers.
* WeSeed <weseed.com> WeSeed is a free online community for sharing ideas and to figuring out the stock market-without the middle man telling you how to invest.
I have never met them, but it would be a pleasure to interview Jennifer Openshaw - CEO & Co-Founder if she is around. Currently, they have a splage page with several videos from YouTube. I invite you to check their Twitter page (with only 11 followers and 1 update...) They also have a page on Facebook.
* Yodlee <yodlee.com> Yodlee delivers innovative financial applications that make online banking more profitable. Accel and S1 Corporation are two of their investors. Their solutions are focused mainly on three key areas of online banking: Personal Financial Management, Payments and Customer Acquisition.
Yodlee managed to reinvent themselves: they are not the "account aggregation company" anymore. They provide an excellent Personal Finance Management solution for banks as well as individuals. They power the popular PFM service from Bank of America.
While I was in San Francisco to cover FinovateStartup
live on NetBanker, I had to chance to visit Yodlee's offices in Redwood City. I was keen to catch up with the knowledgeable Peter Hazlehurst.
I met Peter for the first time last year in New York at the first Finovate event.
“Christophe's book is really the must-have synopsis of the current state-of-play in social media in banking. Christophe has taken a deep passion for the topic, and turned it into an account of the landscape valuable to anyone who has social media responsibilities in financial services” James Gardner, General Manager at Spigit
“Christophe is extremely well informed about the banking and financial services industries. He's at all the right conferences, and digs deep with his interviews of all the influencers and innovators. He's also a tremendously nice guy :-)” Aaron Patzer, Founder & CEO at Mint Software
“Christophe seems to have his finger on the pulse of the financial services industry. Visible Banking has become "the" source of information for innovations in the financial services industry.” Tim Collins, SVP-Experiential Marketing at Wells Fargo
I hope you have already bought your ticket for Finovate 2008 in NYC on October 14th! 
I covered 
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