cloud high street: virtual banking, real innovation

Ever noticed how you always seem to find something really interesting when you’re looking for something else?

Well, I was looking through this year’s Webby Awards this week. The Webbies are like the Oscars for web design. I came across two amazing new banking sites I never knew were there.

These two sites address two real pain points for customers. And while our high street banks bleat about how difficult it is for them to change the colour of the pens on their counters, two newcomers do something really fresh and well, innovative.

Coming to a virtual high street near you

The first is from Santa Clara, California. Its called Billeo. The founders are ex-Hewlett Packard Murali Subbarao and one of the industry’s leading Internet architects, Allwyn Lobo.

Billeo is a free service providing a neat way for consumers to handle bill payments. By allowing them to deal with bill payments all in one place, it takes away a major headache. Billeo stores payment information along with passwords and other account details.

Supported by venture funding from Altos, ATA, Claremont Creek and Pacifica backed by the finance sector’s biggest biller directory, Billeo has already won recognition with the Online Banking Reports ePayment “Best of the Web” and the 2009 SIIA CODiE awards.

The next new kid on the block is Rudder. Similar to Billeo, this online payments service takes things one step further by introducing a finance management and reminders package that gives consumers full control of their outgoing and finances.

Again a US start up, Sewickley, Pennsylvania-based Rudder was created by software entrepreneur Nikhil Roy, who founded pioneering software company eSoftware Solutions. Rudder was seeded by venture capital fund Meakem Becker Venture Capital.

If these guys can do it, why not the high street banks?

Remember how some kids at school shrugged-off knocks and scrapes and even terrible disadvantages while others just used their situation as a reason to just not try?

Well there’s something of the “let me be excused gym lessons” in our high street banks. Suffocated by a culture of blame, they’ve learnt to keep their heads below the parapet. Who wants to loose a great paying job and pension by getting fired for failure?

But ultimately, any idea can be smothered at birth if enough cynicism and obstacles are placed in its way. Sadly there are too many easy-lifers who spend their time just analysing the words innovation and disruption rather than finding a way to make things happen.

The real butterfly effect

The funny thing about disruption is that a seemingly simple thing starting up in Santa Clara or Sewickley can change the course of the financial river, so everyone has to change direction carried along by the flow. Because that’s what happens in a competitive market. So let’s applaud the little guy, because they’re our future, not the high street.