About This Blog

This blog is meant to catalogue the particular challenges of maintaining and improving the web channel for a small-ish* financial institution. We compete directly in the retail banking space and the small business banking space with not only very large banks but also with larger credit unions…. and a few credit unions our own size, too.

The traditional advantages of size can be flattened – at least in part – by technology. Size will always provide certain advantages, of course, but through focus, organization and strategic co-operation smaller financial institutions like Westminster Savings can provide the same professionalism, features and service online as some much larger credit unions. And sometimes we can even do it better.

This blog is meant to address the particular challenges for FI’s like Westminster Savings:

• How do we use our smaller size as an advantage?
• What does innovation look like without a well-funded research lab?
• How does the traditionally co-operative credit union movement continue to cooperate in an increasingly competitive environment?
• Credit Union Central of BC already acts as a clearing-house for ideas and cooperation for BC credit unions: how do we move those meetings and committees and initiatives out into the web?
• Where do financial institutions our size face their biggest risk?
• What does day-to-day management of the web channel look like for credit unions our size?
• Where can we share each other’s pain?

It’s a professional blog, of interest to only a small number of people with a professional interest in what I do. Fortunately, all of those people are charming, clever and good-looking.

Of course, I don’t speak for Westminter Savings. Anything posted on here reflects my own opinions, and certainly not corporate opinion (although it’s nifty when those are aligned). I host it externally (thanks WordPress!), I maintain it mostly on my own time, and I address things far outside the scope of what Westminster Savings does or plans to do.

How it started
This blog began as a way to keep notes during the Net.Finance conference in Phoenix, Arizona in April 2008 (my original post is below the jump). I wanted a way to both keep and share my notes, and to try out WordPress in the process (I was already familiar with Blogger). It was meant to be a one-time-only deal.

I decided to continue the exercise because I saw in it some professionally useful exercise:

• As an incentive to keep myself on track with larger trends and opportunities
• As a way to deepen my knowledge of blogging, and the potential of blogging
• To provide a simple, untimidating, open opportunity for communication. If nobody cares, they don’t have to participate. But if they do… they can, and it’s easy. And I’m especially interested to hear from people who aren’t normally asked for their opinions about these things.

* “Small” is relative, of course. When I look around at credit unions in North America we’re actually one of the bigger ones, I think. But in BC, where the credit union movement is healthy and mature, there are a few players who are much larger than us… and with whom we directly compete.

The original post
I intend to take notes at my first visit to Net.Finance, and since I’ ll be typing those notes on my laptop anyway, I figure that free hosted blogging software is as good a note taking tool as any – and a little more Ecommerce-ish than my beloved Notepad 2.

I’ll make my notes public to convince the folks back home that I’m actually working and learning and networking and engaging in Ecommerce-ish activities that will in the long run prove useful to my employer and not just going to Arizona to watch Steve Nash and the Big Aristotle prepare for the playoffs. It also gives me an opportunity to compare the hosted WordPress software with Blogger, which I’ve played around with for awhile and am not completely sold on.

This post was written in a departure lounge at YVR, with a view of North Shore mountains, on a beautiful spring day, whilst hoping and praying that the family with the screaming little boy just to the right of me isn’t also going to Phoenix.

I’m not heavily self-editing here (which is difficult for me). I don’t have time to heavily edit and write and listen and discuss at the same time. Sometimes that leads to incoherence or worser english. Too bad. But this is primarily about note-taking (albeit public note-taking), not reporting.

I’m new to Net.Finance too, so partly this is me describing, as a first time participant, the conference itself. It’s not a travel blog (although the Hyatt is very nice, and Phoenix/Scottsdale looks nifty too). Inevitably I’ll be commenting on what’s happening (and how) as well as what’s actually being said.