Payments Watch

It seems like if you want to reinvigorate anything these days you simply put “2.0″ after it and it magically becomes cutting edge, cool and “now” - definitely demanding of one’s attention if they are on top of the most current trends. It would seem that even the conservative banking industry is not immune from the desire to 2.0-ify itself. What is particularly annoying is when the “2.0″ is just blatant marketing.

Before I pick on a particular case of 2.0-itis, in fairness I want to point out that everyone is doing it: there is enterprise 2.0, business 2.0, print 2.0, and even cooking 2.0. Here is an exercise I encourage you to try: pick any word, put “2.0″ after it and enter into Google. You’ll probably find something. Sometimes the use of “2.0″ is somewhat warranted, as is actually the case with most of the specific examples I listed above.

The whole “2.0″ suffix phenomenon derives from the term Web 2.0 attributed to Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. It’s about the web as a platform, harnessing collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, lightweight programming, software above a single device and rich user experiences. It’s about hackability, trusting your users and the long tail. The problem is that “2.0″ is being applied to everything even if it has nothing to do with the general characteristics O’Reilly had in mind.

Here is one example: a conference called Banking 2.0. This conference suggests that it will explore “some of the hottest topics in banking”:

* Using Technology To Create Customer Loyalty
* Growth in a Risk-Conscious Environment
* Realizing the Promise of the Integrated Enterprise
* Improving Speed to Market
* How SOA Is Enabling Bank Transformation

No doubt these are “hot topics”, but with the possible exception of the first item (and with this you require some imagination), these topics are not really screaming “2.0″ at me at all. Where is the discussion on social networking as it pertains to banking? Peer to peer lending? Narrowcasting and personalized services? Banking across multiple devices? Technologies such as blogs, rss and wikis? This conference just seems to address traditional topics. I guess the “2.0″ makes it sell better. By the way, I don’t mean to pick on this particular conference and maybe deep down somewhere in the agenda they talk about 2.0 things. It just seems like a marketing ploy, and others do the same thing.

A banking 2.0 conference in my mind would include people like Wesabe, Prosper, Facebook Lending Club, Wells Fargo, etc. Expert speakers would include Colin from the BankWatch and Jim at NetBanker. Well, that’s what we think at Payments Watch 2.0.