Seattle PI does a nice summary of the workings of prosper.com. Web site offers real personal loans Prosper brings together lenders and borrowers. Lenders can make loans as small as $50, togain deiversification, while borrowers get what they need. The interest rates are attractive, and the piece makes the point that many view Propser as part of their investment portfolio diversification. Payment News point out that recently Online Banking Report predicted this market could reach $1Bn within 5 years. At that level the impact on tradtional banks is small in the near term. But I wonder if that assessment is … Continue reading Summary of prosper.com

Great post from Javelin, with a simple message.  Javelin Strategy and Research » Here’s a lousy idea: banks offering a “shred day” Bankers, don’t undermine your safety and marketing efforts. …… why in the world should my customers be advised to destroy what they can eliminate? Apparently a couple of Bankshad a “shred day” where they invited customers to bring in paper documents, statements etc, to have them shredded in the interests of security.  Relevance to Bankwatch:Online banking is having to be continually defended for security reasons, yet its much simpler for criminals to steal identity using things in your … Continue reading Misguided messsage – Banks “shred day”

Courtesy of Customer World, here is a great interview with Kamath, CEO of ICICI Bank.  It is now India’s 2nd largest bank. This first quote is fabulous. Customer World: ICICI Leadership Secrets So our challenge is to invent a new business model where we can create a distribution base effectively in 600,000 villages in India, and to learn to do that at one-tenth the cost of urban India. Just to put that into a scale that someone could understand, we believe that to succeed in urban India, we need to do be able to do business at one-tenth the cost … Continue reading ICICI Leadership Secrets

The title of this paper is terribly academic, but the premise is not. Interactivity increases user satisfaction and trust in your web site. SSRN-A Theoretical Model and Empirical Results Linking Website Interactivity and Usability Satisfaction by Paul Lowry, Trent Spaulding, Taylor Wells, Gregory Moody, Kevin Moffit, Sebastian Madariaga Results indicate that interactivity is successfully able to increase website satisfaction. Finally, implications for practitioners, limitations of the study, and directions for future research are addressed. This is highly significant for banks, because our sites are text heavy, and generally low on the interactivity scale. The exception is online banking, and interestingly … Continue reading A Theoretical Model and Empirical Results Linking Website Interactivity and Usability Satisfaction

Bruce Temkin at Forrester examines the changes in behaviour, and attitudes experienced over the last three years. Forrester Research: The Changing Financial Consumer EXECUTIVE SUMMARY         Length: 12 pages We examined changes in the attitudes and behaviors across five generations of consumers during the past three years. Over the years, some attitudes have shifted: Older consumers are less likely to shop around, price is increasingly more important than brand, consumers are more likely to take investment risks, and Validators are turning into Delegators. We also found a sharp rise in online financial activities — especially with younger generations of … Continue reading The Changing Financial Consumer; A Look At Consumer Shifts Between 2003 And 2006

Understanding niche markets is critical for banks in my estimation.  The other day I posted about women.  Here is another niche, gays, who have high income, propensity to spend,  borrow and save.  Ideal bank customers. Survey: Online banking services more vital to gays | Chicago Tribune Gay men and lesbians are significantly more interested in Internet banking and are more confident investors than heterosexuals, a new study shows. When deciding where to conduct business, 60 percent of gays say it’s very important that a financial institution provide service through the Internet, compared with only 50 percent of heterosexuals, according to … Continue reading Survey: Online banking services more vital to gays

I like this rule.  I like it because its intuitive, and makes sense of the way things really are.  It stops the generalisation which frequently kills internet ideas and models’ credibility. Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | What is the 1% rule? It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. Some examples quoted: youtube – 65K uploads/ 100 million downloadswikipedia – 1.8% write 70% of the articlesyahoo groups … Continue reading The 1% rule of internet