BarCampBankSeattle

Saturday, I went to the morning session of BarCampBankSeattle — I wasn’t able to make it to the other sessions due to work and a wedding — and I attended a couple of sessions about various trends in banking and commerce. I didn’t get to have my session on vertical applications for banking, which is a bit of a shame, but there you go.

I went to three different sessions:

Loyalty Economics
The key question in measuring satisfaction for banking applications (and for many things, I suspect) isn’t “how satisfied are you?” but “how likely would you be to recommend this [whatever] to others?” This, followed up with “why?” is apparently a more useful metric for predicting growth than most others, and is called the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS is measured by asking people to answer that question on a scale of 1-10, and then subtracting the percentage of people who answered 0-6 (your “detractors”) from the percentage of people who answered 9-10 (your “promoters.”) Apparently, the highest rated companies on this score are Harley Davidson, Costco, and USAA.

Money as Primary Social Network
This speaker proposed moving beyond single alternative currencies (such as Ithaca Hours, and various forms of local currencies and hour exchanges) to a system where any group that was large enough in a community could issue their own currency.

This is a strange solution to a well-known problem — sometimes using money to mediate exchange of goods and services fails. This can happen when you have a group of people all willing to exchange with eachother, but they don’t actually have enough money around to mediate the exchange. In the system that currently exists, we’d have to work through informal networks to do that exchange, but in this guy’s proposed system, we’d be able to *issue* eachother currency (essentially formalized network IOUs) to mediate the exchange.

This is all true enough, but I’m not sure that the solution he proposed (100s of currencies in a city the size of seattle all done virtually over the network through a terminal at each vendor) fits the scope of the problem well.

FaceBook and Financial Applications
This was a session about whether facebook is a useful tool for financial applications to use. It mostly came out split between arrant tech utopiana and people talking about human factors in a technical frame, which I think was useful but not relevant.

In short, the conclusion was that “like AOL was, facebook is a tiny closed environment, and it’s hard to see what the impulse is for institutions and apps other than ‘getting stuff up there.’” One participant added “I expect open clients such as the iPhone to be a better investment of my development dollars than working heavily inside of facebook.”

So, that’s my participation wrap-up. Also many congratulations to Betsy and Jason whose wedding celebration I went to Saturday night.