James Gardner has just been putting in his latest post the case for an increased ability by organizations to nurture disruptive innovations. I’m not sure I share James’ optimism, furthermore I don’t think that a renewed agile strategic process will do any difference in that regard.

This made me think of an intellectual experiment. What if we witnessed the appearance of alien ships equipped with a new arm aimed at our business organization? In the vein of a neutron bomb - that leaves intact the building but destroy any life forms within it - this weapon would be more lenient and able to keep the occupants, their brains and skills intact- to the exception of any recall of what was the former organigram and the functions attached to anyone.

My first question would be: what do you think would be the instant drop in capitalization of your company on the market place after such an attack? My second question would be: do you think it will ever be able to recover?

With that in mind, I believe that the market has shown an amazing capacity at creating this sort of organizational value by quickly assembling different skills readily available to build on an innovation. I see an extreme difficulty in reshaping most organizations beyond acceptable adjustments.

We can take the Google and Microsoft example as a yardstick. I think that , if we were to investigate the composition of the two employees population, we should find statiscally a very comparable pool of talents, age distribution and so one. Nevertheless, I think that Microsoft’s pecking order makes excessively unlikely that they will ever be able to compete with Google on their turf.

If you are still sceptical in the leeway that the market has and that organizations have not: Can you imagine an organization accepting to replace most of their 50-something senior management staff by 30-something guys? This is what the market is putting ex nihilo in place regularly. Whenever a 40-something has acceded by chance to the upper position of a venerable organization, he/she has never tried to rejunevate the executive populations and usually stay on the chair for the next 20 years aggravating the excutive age problem all along.

Last Saturday happened the first BarCampBank London. I shared earlier my excitement of participating to this first English BarCampBank and I must say that I’ve not been disapointed. BCBL was just great!

First we had an interesting mix of participants with

• a lot of influential bloggers, including James Gardner, Dave Birch, Chris Skinner and many others.
• a lot of young fi-startups, including Kublax, Scred, KuberaMoney and many others
• and there were representants of several big banks, mainly from the innovation departements

Second, the different workshops were really great and covered diverse subjects like biometrics in fi-services, innovation and regulation, near money, open banking,.. This all showed that the European ecosystem in financial services is currently full of vibrance.

I disclosed earlier the different projects I’m working on. At BCBL, I had the opportunity to expose in more details the piece about FundCamp FinTech. From the reactions to the discussion and because of the general atmosphere during this BarCampBank, I feel that we should definitely move forward. Anyone interested in this intiative, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Since the first BarCampBank in Sept. 2006 in Paris, BarCampBanks have been springing up everywhere as William Azaroff noted on NetBanker. With such a number of BarCampBanks currently scheduled or being planned, it made me think that we could use some sort of “How To” guide for anyone interested in getting the ball rolling in their city. I decided to throw a shot and put down on blog a couple of ideas and tips. This only represents a personal view and need to be elaborated. Please, anyone build on this and create your own version.

Rules?

1. What is a BarCampBank?: this is a BarCamp where people gather around the mission of “fostering innovations and the creation of new business models in the world of banking and finance“. This means that people will be enjoying the power of the unconference format with the expectation of finding like-minded people interested in innovation in banking and finance.
2. Should it be free?: the goal of a BarCampBank is to attract very motivated people. A fee should not be a barrier to get interested and interesting people in the room. But we know that having people pay a small fee shows commitment in participating and helps planners arrange for logistics. My view is that a fee of the order of a good meal at a near-by restaurant could serve as a landmark. We should try to get sponsors to cover most of the expense and let costs be supported by the fee only for essential things (which means that we should definitely get a sponsor for the room)
3. Should I use the BarCampBank logo?: my view is that we should benefit from having some sort of visual link. While I think it is great that logos reflect as much “localness” as possible, it would be great to keep a central recurrent theme. The BarCamp’s logo with the piggy could serve this purpose at this time.

How to get started

1.  create a page on BarCamp’s wiki with the naming convention BarCampBankMyCity and possibly a number if this is not the first one in your city
2. start filling out the page, using possibly content taken from http://barcamp.org/BarCampBankTemplate
3. register on http://barcamp.org/BarCampBank under the “Getting planned” section
4. broadcast the news to see if it gets momentum
5. if you get enough interest, set a date (having a firm agreement for a venue usually helps in the choice of the date)
6. move on http://barcamp.org/BarCampBank to the “Firm” section
7. open up registrations. This can be done directly on the wiki, but - because of regular defacements on BarCamp’s wiki - I would recommend using a tool like EventBrite or equivalent to keep a clean list. You’ll need this tool anyway if you are planning to ask for a small fee.
8. broadcast even wider when date and venue are set. You can use the different BarCampBank groups on Google, FaceBook,.. to make your BarCampBank known.*

OK, now if you are playing with the idea of organizing a local BarCampBank, hopefully this will help you get going. There’s only one thing to remember: you’ll never know if this is going to work if you do not give it a shot!

This is going to be quite a fastuous Summer for BarCampBank this year with no less than 4 events happening across the globe: BarCampBankDallas, BarCampBankLondon, BarCampBankMadison and BarCampBank Vancouver are the 4 BarCampBanks on firm dates.

I’m personnaly involved in the organization of the only European BarCampBank in this series: BarCampBankLondon. Antony Evans and Thomas Barker have done a wonderful job making this first UK BarCampBank a reality and I’m excited and honored being part of their team. While I wish I could have intended every single BarCampBank on earth, I must admit that being 2 hours away from London makes this most convenient. With the commendable determination of attending every BarCampBanks in the US (and Canada..), Morriss Partee will thus surely hold very soon the record of participation to BarCampBanks. We should all applaude his stamina. I’m nonetheless equally happy that London has now joined the club and offers a valuable opportunity for European fi-startups to gather and show the vibrance of entrepreneurship in this sector.

I hope meeting a lot of you there. Resgistrations happen on http://bcblondon.eventbrite.com/. Thank you for all your help in broadcasting this event and making it an absolute success for innovation in financial services.

Like the vast majority of people I think, I have only two places where I hoard money.

The first one is my physical wallet The amount is not significant, but I could not do without it, yet. Money in it is not sticky, in the sense that it’s flowing efficiently and rapidly out of my wallet, sometimes too rapidly. So cash is nice, except for one thing, it’s reach is rather limited, I have to hand-out cash to make a payment and be physically connected. So I turn to this storage of money for standard use, buying bread, paying taxis,… When I want to replenish my physical wallet, I turn to my second pile of money: my bank account.

My bank account is indeed the second place wher I store money. The amount is more significant and certainly too high from a pure financial consideration. While replenishing my physical wallet by going to an ATM is a bit of drag, it’s all-in-all quite ok. Money is flowing relatively well between the two. In fact, most of the flow out of my bank account is done for standard payments like grocery, electronics,.. and is done via a debit card. There again things are not that bad and; at this point money is not too sticky.

But then, there are all this other flows or non-existing flows which show that my bank money can be very sticky.

In the category of existing flows where money is a pain moving, I’d put things like buying financial assets, making payments to a foreign friend. If you want to buy a financial asset that is not offered by your bank, you then see how sticky money is, you have to make multiple operations to complete your transaction. Sure, banks have a interest in making your money sticky, they would rather having you buy financial assets they provide. But even there, money is not flowing swiftly: what’s the point of raising customer satisfaction when your money is captive anyway. Concerning payments to a foreign friend, we reach the ridiculous: you don’t see money flowing, but evaporating through fees and time delays. Before we had PayPal, transfering money to a friend in another country was close to the non-existant category.

Which leads to the category of non-existant flows, or at least not existing yet. And here, I’ll turn again to my P2PMoney pet project. Leaving in a global world, with many interactions with a growing community of contacts, I think we will have more and more a desire to see our money freely and swiftly being pooled, spent and redistributed among varying groups we belong to. And for these workflows, bank money is flowing like a rock.

So we have now Telecom operators coming with the concept of a M-Wallet. While I don’t know how fast I’ll turn to this third type wallet, there’s one thing I’m sure: I don’t want my M-money to be sticky. And being not sticky does not mean money flows swiftly for transactions that are in the operators best interest, it means it flows swiftly for thing I want to do!

I’m packing my things to be ready Wednesday morning when I fly to San Francisco. Next week-end there will be BarCampBank San Francisco, first BarCampBank of the year, and quite an unsual event because of the wealth of startups that will be represented there: Wesabe, Mint, Zoppa, Zecco, just to name a few who confirmed their presence here, and I hope a lot more will drop-in to join the mind-shaking debates we can anticipate.

I will use the opportunity to discuss with all the brilliant people there a couple of projects I’m currently working on:

1) creating a virtual incubator for FI-startups

In the spirit of P2PVenture, I think there is an opportunity to create a virtual space where entrepreneurs, professionals and investors can mingle and co-develop projects up to the point where some of the professionals can join the project and investors finance it

2) creating a FI angel investors network

One of the components of the previous space could be a virtual angel investors club dedicated to the FI-business. I’m thinking of maybe setting up such a club in a near future

3) organizing a FundCamp FinTech

While launching FundCamp is one of the main action of P2PVenture.org right now. I’m also thinking of organizing a FundCamp dedicated to FinTech. I also see this as an opportunity to boot-strap the 2 previous points.

4) setting up a FinTech venture fund

This is a rather longer term project. There are not so many venture funds dedicated to FinTech and I believe there could be an opportunity to offer real value along the money a dedicated FinTech venture fund would invest in FI-startups.

As you see, quite a lot of things to discuss and get feedback on. Hopefully, critical mass could be assembled on a couple of these subjects and we could see something taking off in a not too distant future.

Long time, no posts. I have indeed been quite absent from this blog for a while. For my excuse, I have been quite busy working on FundCamp and in particular FundCamp France 2008 (FR). But I have here a particular occasion to come back and post some exciting news: BarCampBanks are going to be organized in San Francisco March 29 and in New England Apr 5; there’s also an event that should be happening in Dallas in June. How exciting!!! I hope that Europe is going to have its lot and that the session in London is going to happen soon, so that my 2008 travel budget does not go through the roof.

Jim Bruene from NetBanker was first to release the news. Jesse Robbins has just posted the announcement on Radar O’Reilly. I’m excited to meet both of them soon on one of these BarCampBanks (full disclosure, I have a firm flight reservation for SFO March 26). I’m also excited to meet all the barcampbankers and fi-startups there. If you can, I think it would be worth coming to any of these events.

 I have not been updated my blog for a long time and guess what, mainly because of my last post. In this post, I was annoucing that we launched FundCamp, an initiative to let people share processes and tools for organizing seed acceleration contests. Since then, I have been quite busy actually organizing FundCamp France 2008, the first FundCamp ever.

 FundCamp France 2008 will happen on the week of march 17, 2008. 20 projects will be preselected to spend an intense week of exchanges and coaching in Paris. At the end of the week, a dozen of French business angels will select 5 or more projects to which a funding of 25k € for 10% in equity will be offered. The business angels will then coach the winning projects for the next 6 months in order to reach a funding round by the end of year 2008.

 The annoucement is surely only a small step and we’ll still have a lot to do - and wish for - to make FundCamp France 2008 a success. But I think this is already a good sign that so many people got involved and took risks to launch this initiative and I’d like to take these few moments just to enjoy this sign that maybe things can change when enough people try to change them.

We just launched FundCamp. FundCamp has been inspired by Seedcamp, an initiative created by Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni seeking to fund companies on a pan-European scale through a selection process culminating with a week of gathering/selection that took place in London on Sept. 3 for their first edition. But, in the tradition of BarCamp, FundCamp wants to go one step beyond and setup a community driven, open and freely replicable model. Anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to use, adapt and contribute to the process model and tools we wish to put in place.

Our first application of the model will be for a FundCamp France, organizing a selection, development and funding process for French startups. We plan to use a platform for supporting this initiative and a prototype is currently being built here. Everyone is invited to help organizing the event, participate as a mentor, contribute to the development of the platform,…, come up with any idea to foster entrepreneurship through this novel approach.

If anyone is considering organizing a FundCamp anywhere, please do not hesitate to share your thoughts on our wiki. We’ll see if we can build critical mass to bootstrap the process where you are. As we move forward, we will keep posting our progress and findings.

LendingClub just announced that it secured a Series A round of $10M from Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Seems like things are really accelerating and VCs are pouring more and more money in new financial startups.

 We spotted LendingClub at BarCampBank a while back and put them on our Bank & Finance Watch site. Seems like we are going to live a rapid increase in the number of startups we’ll follow on our site and witness more and more funding for a selection of these.