Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Blog

Thanks to all the participants at yesterdays roundtable on enterprise 2.0 for financial institutions. I’m sure we could have spent many more hours discussing the challenges and opportunities for the financial sector – we’re looking to run a dedicated forum on enterprise and web 2.0 for financial institutions in May if there’s enough interest.

Here’s my summary, and of course I hope we can continue this discussion via the comments below.

The general feeling from the table was that financial institutions are still struggling with relinquishing control, making it difficult to truly embrace both enterprise and Web 2.0. There are still plenty of large banks banning Facebook, much to the embarrassment and frustration of their employees. Some institutions are actively discouraging Facebook users from revealing who they work for on their Facebook site, and some bankers believe Facebook and work identities shouldn’t mix. Smaller institutions seem to be more open to the idea – Newcastle Permanent Building Society has a Facebook group and doesn’t attempt to control what goes on there.

I asked the group why the industry has been slow to adopt enterprise 2.0 apps. While there’s a lot of interest in wikis, bankers feel building a business case is difficult for something that delivers “intangible results”, “tech” terms like wiki and even enterprise 2.0 put some people off, and larger institutions are still trying to successfully merge business and IT so that such opportunities are driven by the business and not IT teams.

Nevertheless there was an acknowledgement that both staff and customers expect the corporation to offer apps that in many cases they are using elsewhere, and so it’s likely there will be more experimentation by the sector, if only for recruitment and retention purposes.

As always start-ups have the upper hand in this race to innovate – we briefly discussed financial social networking sites (eg Wesabe, Mint) at the roundtable yesterday, as well as peer to peer lending (Eg Fosik, iGrin) – both of which have the potential to threaten the relationships banks have with their customers. I’ve got more on Wesabe over at the Better Banking Blog and would recommend bankers watch these start-ups closely to better understand why the industry needs to rethink its desire to control information.