The World’s First Social Community Bank

This is an abstract of Dennis Howlett‘s post on “The World’s First Social Community Bank” and Matthias Kröner (Founder & CEO of Fidor). Both met last Tuesday at the SOMESSO Zurich 09 conference. I’m certain that Matthias must have made a quite strong impression on Dennis – which is, let’s be honest here, not an easy thing to do. During the day the question “is fidor bank the worlds first social community bank?” was raised by @hubculture.

Here are Dennis’ thoughts:

[...] I doubt it. [...] The difference today is that Fidor is the first (that I know) that’s actively leveraging the innovations offered by Web 2.0 computing to create an entirely new type of bank.

It is a bank that is reputation based and where reputation is a transparently represented idea that is wholly dependent upon the activities of people who participate in the community that ARE the bank.

[...] I’ve talked previously about the value of reputation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in banking. Our trust in banks is vital to so many things we understand about business. Without it – Lehmans happens. Even after 100+ years.

Dennis continues to talk about their discussion (which took up most of the time that was allocated for an interactive session – even one of the tech guys stepped out of the control room and joined in on this).

The main argument evolves around reputation – it’s creation, management and audit.

Dennis even goes as far as saying:

[...] Ergo – I am super excited.

I can only share this excitement and quote one last thing:

[...] They’re based in Germany and are concentrating their efforts on that market. But – and here’s the killer: they have a license that will allow them to trade across the whole EU market. That’s a potential market of 350 million people. [...]

If you wanna know what all the fuss is about, then watch this video of Matthias at SOMESSO Zurich 09, filmed and edited by Dennis. Original post can be found on Dennis Howllett’s blog