True statement #1: banks move bags of money from A to B. To do so, banks facilitate the transfer of money over a variety of channels, such as the internet, bank accounts and stocks. The bank’s core business is to match supply and demand and to facilitate that money transfer.

True statement #2: banks safeguard money. They keep your and my money indoors, available for future usage.

Everything else is circumstantial. That includes interest rates, cross selling of other products, the flavor of your mortgage, help desks, branches and all the marketing efforts. Which is painful – because that is what makes the difference between bank 1 and bank 2. Most banks have shown to be outstanding on money movements and safeguarding. As a result, most money is spent on marketing efforts, relationship management and other circumstantial services.  Obviously, I’m afraid that all innovation will come from circumstantial services – nice to do, but not the type of thing that drives us idealists

Wondering what all of this is about? It’s about selling to banks. You’ll find that the incentives for bank employees to buy in are different from regular business incentives. It’s not about revenue growth; it’s about market share. It’s about finding new channels for banking that replace current channels rather than establish a new channel on top of the others. It’s about building and retaining trust at all times, in each relationship, each transaction, in the past, present and future. Think carefully about your value proposition – regular business sense might not qualify at this playground …

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Banks traditionally have offered money and interest in a very trustworthy way. Throughout the years though, banks have developed deep relationships with consumers as well as corporations and entrepreneurs.

As cash is becoming a commodity, access to these relationships are a service that banks are commercializing. And they should – it’s of tremendous value of any entrepreneurial company to quickly establish the right relationship with the right company.

The obvious challenge now is how to operationalize this intermediary role. A clerk’s time is very limited already. So the pioneers are looking into the use of social networking engines, very much like LinkedIn.com’s networking capabilities combined with the matching power of an eBay. We’ll have to see how that is going to fly, as it’s the personal approach that contains the true value of this networking – it’s the clerk who has the contacts and the insights into the businesses. Besides: if this will fly with a matching system then what do we need banks for?

- Nicotine is said to help fight Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia – cigarettes help your memory and attention! source

- An artificial heart that doesn’t beat – it’s smaller and has a longer lifespan than one that does. Why do we bother with having a pulse anyway? Seems a valid question, kinda scary though … source

- Life expectation can be extended through restriction of calories – it actually works very well, but we all know it’s too hard to keep up with source

For those who are working on these projects: good stuff !

This has actually happened to me a number of times. You’re trying to run through your daily lack of routine, when your manager steps up to you, enthusiastically mentioning that he’s got this great friend who’s in business as well. Looking forward to do some business together. If I can come up with some ideas on what that might be … (sigh)

The warning up front is that these kinds of partnerships are the least likely to be successful. It’s up to you if you want to confront your boss with this or bite the bullet and try to make the best of it.

As this is probably gonna happen more often, with you as well as with me, so here comes the regular procedure that I step through when lightning strikes:

1) Google the friendly company – try to understand the business that they’re in. Don’t stop here though. If they’re in the news, then what is that about? Which pain points do they have? And – often overlooked – think of how they go to market, how they supposedly deal with their suppliers, how they deal with their marketing, their human resources etc etc etc

2) Find your counterpart in the partner’s organisation. Go through your boss, his golf mate and then down – saves you to set the urgency and the introduction. Plus, as we say in The Netherlands, shared aching is only half the aching Ask this guy for any trends that are shaping his industry, currently and in the near future. Also share your views on that – really fun process I assure you!

3) Find potential synergies, simply through brainstorming and thinking ahead. Obviously, easiest is to establish a new business from scratch.

Look out for one pitfall though: joining forces to benefit from economies of scale seems attractive, but try to avoid that. There will be pain in establishing that and that drills through the organization. And as it doesn’t sound like popular material for parties, it is not the kind of thing that your boss and his friend will want to discuss casually.

4) Document the new opportunity to be sold to your bosses, such that they can bring it forward themselves. This is the usual stuff (solution, pain, commercialization, economic model, strategic fit, competitors, market potential & industry characteristics, management team, risk&assumptions, milestones, next steps)

Once you’ve got that put together you’re ready. Ready to be slaughtered or the be praised No worries, we al go through that

Now, this learning and engagement is key, as that is essential to infuse into today’s educational system. And I’m not just talking about going to school – it’s also about how we learn and perform as adults, within our professional environment.

The intriguing thing about video games is that they’ve become so tremendously complex, that there’s really no way that you can help out your son when he’s stuck with his video game. Without having a huge pile of manuals to spit through, they’ve mastered the equivalent of a month’s study when having finished such a game.

Now the challenge ought to be clear: how does one bring gaming elements onto the workfloor? How do we handle our incentives such that they become addictive, not just to top management, but throughout all levels of the organisation? Just think of the productivity of your workers within such an environment.

But that raises the next question … how does one continue this engagement? Kids are known to play intensively on one game, to leave it behind the next day. Maybe this leads to a flexible workforce, where people work for one boss or for one project as long as they are able to give themselves 100% as they’re addicted to work. And then move on to the next project, moving into a next steep learning curve.

Now this is chaos. But it would make life much more fun for a lot of people, and as a side-effect provide spin off opportunities, as people from all kinds of different backgrounds now look at their work very differently from how they used to. And that’s where innovation starts …

Airconditioning is just one of the quick hitters. Think about datacenters – running one slurps the equivalent energy usage of a city of 150,000 citizens. That’s a lot – and half goes into cooling the data center rather than in calculations. Small changes sum up to tremendous savings – any data center is said to be able to save 35% of its energy cost – that’s about half a million per year.

The third opportunity is probably in intelligent meters. Devices that know what you’re absorbing each minute. We’re having these implemented in The Netherlands. The fun element is that you can turn on the switches from behind your computer. The savings element is found indirectly in greater awareness and benchmarking. You can see the comments from your energy company coming in: “hey, you’re using 53% more energy than your neighbour”. Try to explain that to your partner

As if these benefits in themselves do not provide enough benefit, most governments offer royal subsidy programmes, returning up to 44% of the price of the purchased technology or service. Makes the return on investment much quicker

For corporations there’s an opportunity here to improve the bottom line, but also to benefit from the publicity around going green – just ride the wave! But why would you be the change agent for your boss, while starting your own energy consultancy business is now such attractive?!

For more information: McKinsey published a package of reports on energy earlier this year. Available for free on their website.

Well, all of these might be right. There’s one other trend that is shaking the foundation of the bank though. From an unexpected angle. It’s called personalization.

Today the portfolio of products and services available to us as customers is massively broad. So broad actually, that I’d wonder if you’d be able to pick the product that is right for you. So broad actually, that I’d have second thoughts about just entering my local bank and ask the clerk to select the best product for me. This poor guy just has too much homework to go through to find his way through all of these products.

On the other hand – we’ve got this wild range of products because we ask for it. And because banks need to distinguish themselves against their competitors. Moving bags of money from A to B isn’t very innovative in itself, as you might comment.

Anyone observing these developments will come to the conclusion that over the next year, a new player will rise who is better at creating truly personalized on the spot. That’s your opportunity – go for it.

How to do this? Map out your operational economics: how are you TRULY making money and what is costing money. Make an excel sheet in which you lay out these fundamentals – best of course if your 6 year old can understand it Design various ways to deliver products and services, that all tie in on these operational economics in some way or the other. Bottom line: you know in milliseconds whether you’re gonna make money on a product or service or not, no matter how customized or personalized it is.

These are the fundamentals of your new business. Looking for a player who has already done some of the groundwork? Vallstein is known to have mapped portions of the basic earnings model of banks. Look for an internet mechanism such as Bank of Scotland’s as an engine to produce personalized products rapidly. Be creative but pragmatic: keep things simple. The next move is yours.