A banking innovators forum

Just discovered James Gardner‘s latest idea of an innovators forum to help ideas sprout within financial organizations. As James noted, I think this could very well be complementary to what BarCampBank is trying to do.

In fact, BarCampBank is trying to incubate innovations from the outside of financial organizations. While some innovations may be smoothly re-integrated in time within current organizations, some could prove disruptive and create totally new organizations.

This innovators forum would aim at creating innovations from within. In my view, the unconference format could then prove very powerful to unleash innovative ideas and see the emergence of critical mass to change things rapidly.

The two are in fact very synergetic (a word M&A people like very much). I’m eager to see this forum start and look for opportunities of cooperation with BarCampBank.

Private Capital Markets

The Economist released this week an interesting article on the subject of financial exchanges. This gives a broad view of the sweeping changes currently taking place in the world of capital markets.

I’ve been thinking lately quite a lot on the more specific subject concerning private equity placements and ways to create liquidity. I’ve discovered in the process several places doing interesting things like Entrex or others.

What is striking is that the Market is creating many alternatives to the cumbersome machines that the public exchanges have become: selling shares under limited scrutinity, selling blocks of shares between big players,.. It should be remembered that some of these liberties have progressively and conciously been banned from the public markets to prevent small investors from being abused or having big players acting according their own set of rules. It is also interesting to see that a lot of these are genuine innovations made possible by the advent of new technologies,  better understanding of risks and the creation of clever mechanisms to handle complex contracts.

While the good old public capital markets are becoming more and more global, it should be noted that the population of capital markets at large may be becoming more and more distributed.

Virgin acquires majority stake in CircleLending

The announcement of Virgin’s acquisitive move is interesting on two fronts.

First, with a major household name like Virgin, peer-to-peer lending is gaining respectability (funny indeed).

Second, Richard Branson – even if categorize has a respectable lord – has always been a hell of a disruptor; so acquisition should be hinting the diehards that there’s definitely something cooking up.