BarCampBank London 3 Summary
Pelle Braendgaard
While still fresh in our minds I thought it would be a good idea to
start a thread about it as several list members was present.
All in all I'd say it was extremely useful going there putting faces
on people from the space. I'm quite excited to see so much going on in
Europe and Canada.
I wanted to attend all the tracks as they all sounded interesting, but
I will have to summarize the 2 tracks I did go to:
Open Standards:
Firstly we tried to define what we meant by Open Standards and also
why we needed new ones.
Most people agreed that simplicity was important and that this will
allow creation of both core financial services as well as value added
services.
We discussed the 3 standards that were represented at the table.
Andreas Pizsa of OpenToken, Nils Toedtman of OpenCoin (welcome on the
list Nils) and me pitching OpenTransact.
OpenToken and OpenCoin are both different variations of cash like technologies.
OpenToken servers support essentially 2 operations "join" and "split"
to handle all operations. It has the potential of working via SMS and
even printed coupons. I'll let Andreas go into more detail.
OpenCoin http://opencoin.org/ is interestingly a new implementation of
Chaum's digicash. As far as I understood (Nils please correct me if
I'm wrong) it relies more on being online with the mint than Chaum's
original idea, which makes sense as we live in an always connected
world now. Nils please do introduce OpenCoin on the list.
We agreed that we should work towards having common vocabulary within
all 3 standards and work on some level of interoperability between all
3 so one wallet could work with all.
Aric talked about some of the really interesting things they are doing
at http://openwallet.org/ using OpenTransact and physical embodiments
of OAuth tokens. Very cool stuff and very close to being live.
Identity and Authentication:
We started out trying to work out how identity and authentication
works today in financial applications. There are 3 big issues here:
1. At the moment users do not own their identity or data within the
financial world.
2. Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements where regulators specify how
financial service providers should identify new customers at an often
great cost.
3. No good way of opening current financial services to external
services. Providing online banking credentials to eg. Mint is just not
acceptable.
Identity it was pointed out should not be seen as being always the same.
Ram Banarjee pointed out that there are 3 levels of identity financial
apps might use today:
1. Anonymous - the user is not required to login. eg. for public data
2. Pseudonymous - The user is really just identified for the purpose
of accessing their information. This is where most web apps fall
today.
3. Full - The app needs to know your meatspace identity. Basically
name, address, id number etc. The reason for this are almost always
for government mandated KYC purposes, but credit institutions also
need a way of running credit checks.
We talked about how there might be another level of social network
identity that could be potentially very useful in the future. This
could potentially be used for both KYC and credit purposes in the
future. RapLeaf in San Francisco is actually already doing this for
several financial institutions in the US, who use it in addition to
their regular credit ranking. Everyone was in agreement that this
could provide good benefits if this was done under the authority of
the user themselves. (which Rapleaf obviously aren't doing).
OAuth was discussed at length and has the potential to solve all kinds
of issues. In particular it allows users to be in charge of sharing
their identity and financial data in a controlled revokable way with
other services.
I mentioned our discussions on the list here about OpenKYC (see
http://wiki.github.com/opentransact/opentransact/know-your-customer
and search list archives for more). Briefly this allows local
companies to setup a KYC service provider using perhaps an extended
version of the Portable Contacts standard. Financial Service Providers
would be able to reach international markets by being able to
outsource their KYC processes to these local service providers.
This seems to have caught the imagination of quite a few people. I
think it was Dave Birch who commented that large established banks
probably look at their KYC process and existing customer databases are
one of their most important assets, that they wouldn't want to share
themselves. Which is also why it would have to be independent service
providers doing this in the beginning.
We talked about local currencies who by definition know their
customers. So going local is also another way of avoiding the
headaches of KYC for small startups in the field. It was also
mentioned that Western Union only do KYC on the sender and not on the
recipient, which was quite interesting.
John from PayPal mentioned that they have experimental OpenID/OAuth
setup for some things. I need to research this myself. He also
mentioned that they might be interested in an experimental
OpenTransact implementation.
Please do comment. In particular I would like to hear from the other
tracks. Like Alternative Currencies and Value Added Services which
both sounded really interesting.
Regards
Pelle
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Josef Davies-Coates
Smiles,
Josef.
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Josef Davies-Coates
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http://uniteddiversity.com
Together We Have Everything
otak...@gmail.com
Very interesting.
I just hope eBay/Paypal don't steal all your great ideas! :-)
Alex
michael linton
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfgbzhbp_87hnnmsxc8
I'll try in a day or so to make a summary of the sessions I was in - banking the unbanked (getting money to the unmoneyed) and community currencies - but as I wasn't taking notes, and I was operating on 6 hours sleep in the 3 days before, the notes aren't going to be nearly as comprehensive & useful as yours.
Very good to meet you and all the other suspects.
cheers, Michael
Frederic Baud
I know you meant this as a kind joke, but I'd like to give one of my
usual rant because this is a subject I'm very involved with.
My personal view is that ideas have more values when they are shared
than when they are kept for oneself.
The whole goal of events like BarCampBank is to put everything on the
table and see how we can get more out of what was brought, through
cross-pollination and recombination.
I believe that big organizations or startups are not good for
implementing the same things. By sharing ideas and then implementing
the ones they are best fit to, we're sure that a lot more can be done
for everyone. Furthermore, if PayPal gets to implement some of the
ideas that were presented, I would think that startups could build a
lot of new services thanks to that.
So it is my personal opinion that innovators should never be reluctant
to share with bigger organizations. Either these organizations will
not be able to implement these ideas, but may possibly then act as
partners; or they can easily implement them, then it's better for a
nimbler group to let a steamroller develop the market and think about
the additional services they'll be able to build thanks to that.
Cheers,
Frederic
Count Zero
Count Zero
If I am not mistaken, the guy died poor.
Tuomas Toivonen
Hi,
> Please do comment. In particular I would like to hear from the other
> tracks. Like Alternative Currencies and Value Added Services which
> both sounded really interesting.
For the first BCBL session I attended Open Standards of which Pelle
already provided a good writeup. In the afternoon I attended the Value
Added Services session, so a couple of remarks on that.
In general the discussion centered on consumer access to financial data
on purchases held by banks and payment processors. The usual suspects of
the web-based personal finances management came up, as well as the
current mechanisms to enable third parties to access consumer data (ie,
in-house OFX implementations vs using account aggregators such as
Yodlee). Some of the more interesting observations (from a personal
point of view):
- There is a huge amount of metadata generated for each retail purchase.
Unfortunately most of that gets lost or ends up in various systems that
are not interconnected; basically it is almost impossible to reconstruct
the context of the transaction later. Perhaps the most interesting data
is line item level description of the purchase, but such data is only
ends up in the merchant's system, and that's the end of the story.
- If more of the context of transactions were accessible, we could do
pretty much automated accounting. Primarily this is of interest to small
businesses that have formal accounting needs, but have relatively simple
finances. The holy grail here would be sort of straight through
processing accounting where majority of entries would be posted
automatically with no human intervention.
- If you're implementing a personal finance app and let users compare
their spending behaviour against other groups based on some similarity,
it is important to let the user influence the selection of the reference
group. Apparently if you just assign the reference group, then users are
likely to reject the conclusions: "I'm not like that group so your
conclusions don't apply and are useless."
- We also talked some on mobile payments and banking. M-PESA in Kenya
provides payments and banking of sorts to way more people than the
"formal" banking system. Another interesting player is Smart Money of
the Philippines. Smart is providing quite innovative cards linked to the
customer's mobile phone. For example, your card can have multiple
identities (personal/corporate) which you switch between using your
mobile. Spending limits are also manageable with the phone. If thin
you've lost your card, you can temporarily disable it using your phone,
and so on.
We concluded with an anecdote on a company that sells TV sets on
installment plans. Each sold TV is coin operated: you pay a certain
amount, and have the TV operational for the next 4h. Once a month, the
company collects the money and you need to have eg 40 quid in the box.
Interestingly enough, the TV also works as a savings device. If you've
watched enough TV to have deposited over the minimum, you'll get that as
a lump sum. Apparently it works for people who otherwise have hard time
doing any saving at all.
Pelle Braendgaard
I really wanted to be at the Value Added Services session as well.
Thought I'd point out WideLedger, which was developed as a
microformat/simple json format for exchanging financial transactions.
http://github.com/pelle/wideledger
P
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