Gangsta rapper 50cent tweets about a small company of which he owns shares. Within one night the value of this company quadruples and he makes a fortune. So do some lucky twitter followers that took his advise and at the same time fulfilled his prophecy. To find such influential tweets and predict their impact is what the company Stockpulse tries to do algorithmically.

At a Sociel Media Week panel discussion this morning CEO Stefan Nann used this anecdote to illustrate what kind of advantage his customers can expect.

While this clearly is a new and innovative use of the twitter feed, if you look at the big picture, it really just boils down to being more of the same old self-amplifying mechanisms that create bubbles in the stock market. And bubbles will burst. So what Stockpulse is selling their customers is a service that helps them to win in this Ponzi scheme by being the first to buy and the first to sell. The problem of this game is: Only a few win, most lose.

Instead of being part of the problem, Simon Redfern on the other hand is part of the solution. He founded the Open Bank Project that aims to increase transparency of financial transactions in order to fight corruption. A sub-goal of this project is to design an API that enables third party developers to write applications that work with a wide variety of banks. If a bank becomes a platform rather than a full solution provider, a whole zoo of new applications will form around it. End-users win because they get new features and can use whatever app they like best. Bankers win because their product remains competitive even without them driving innovations. This is especially important because banks are notoriously bad innovators.

Using facebook and twitter to intensify the relationship between banks and their customers was discussed as the only adaption of social media by banks we can expect to see on the near future. This is something I am personally not interested in at all. I don’t want my bank to talk to me. And I don’t want to talk to my bank. For the same reasons I also don’t want to talk to my power company or telco or ISP. They are service providers, they are mere cables, they are not interesting. I want to limit the communication to the absolute minimum: reporting when my internet connection is down, I need a new phone or I lost my credit card. I do not want my bank to try to sell me fonds, I do not want my ISP to try to sell me pay-TV and I do not want my telco to try to sell me holiday trips. So I am not interested to add another communication channel they can use to annoy me.

Fidor bank was mentioned as the only example of a bank - in Germany at least - that uses much more of the Internet’s potential. While he appreciates this bank’s user interface and features, one attendee pointed out, it is not really an option for him. He values sustainability more than features and therefor picked an ethical bank.

We should not be forced to pick one over the other.

Banks are service providers. The specialty of the financial sector is that banks are service providers that bundle their services with a specific client application. You are free to choose a wind energy company and you can be sure that the power they provide will work with any light bulb you want to use. In the financial world however, if you choose a bank, you are locked into their web application. The energy is bundled with the light bulb. In 1980 we were forced to use a certain telephone model made by Siemens because that was the only thing that Deutsche Bundespost would allow us to have. We need a banking API to de-bundle, to freely mix and match service providers and third party applications, to enable competition. This will catapult banking from the year 1980 into the current millennium and it will create true innovations in how we interact with money, innovations far beyond accelerating the same old destructive pyramid schemes.