[fr] Notes de la conférence Lift11 à Genève.
Live and India-lagged notes from the Lift11 Conference in Geneva. Might contain errors and personal opinions. Use the comments if you spot nasty errors.
Is going to talk about corruption.
Weave some web 2.0 stuff into banking? Greece: lots of EU funded projects! Lots of corruption. 2 years later… Greece is in trouble. Link?
Distorts markets, undermines the law, breeds cynicism, etc…
Corruption and fraud is one of the reasons foreign aid failed in Africa. World Bank StAR initiative to try and recover stolen assets.
Add to that all the banking and finance scandals over the last ten years. Enron, BCCI, Lehman Brothers, Irish Bank, Vatican… Just google “banking scandal”.
Charities have their fair share of scandals. Fast car of the German charity boss. *(steph-note: one reason I admire small structures like the Ashraya Initiative for Children in Pune, who refuse to grow too much to keep things in control)*
Replace information deficit with more timely transparency. Empower the public rather than let them become distrustful.
Corruption and fraud would be easier to spot if we had “financial debug tools” (like Firebug).
Original idea: what about a bank where all accounts are open to see? (5 years ago).
Challenge the taboo of financial privacy.
And what about a bank which allows easy integration with third party tools and services?
That’s the open bank idea.
- all accounts open to the public
- members form a community
- open source tools
- transactions are transparent
- community can make better deal suggestions
- new business models can form
Financial privacy or disclosure doesn’t have to be on or off. We can add privacy and disclosure settings. [photo coming]
Aims to open transactional data to groups of large people and raise the bar of financial transparency, through open internet standards and transparency.
API: external developers come up with ideas the internal ones didn’t think of.
They are looking for more banks to join them.
It’s interesting. When you relate that proposal to your other post about how banks, schools and so on where googling and looking into facebook to assess people, it’s clearly two different views.
Nevertheless, behind the “nice” idea, practicalities come.
First of all, we already have debugging tools, but we don’t use them (at least in many countries). Certified accounts, tax rolls are open to the citizens.
“Open bank accounts”, fine, but that’s like Wikileaks, it’s just a huge amount of raw data, which would need to be interpreted.
Does he mean the accounts of the bank (but with privacy for the accounts of the customer), or all accounts ? If such a bank opens, what does it change to the countries like Caiman, Luxembourg, (Switzerland yeah), and other small tax paradise where the real problems happen …
How much do we risk to have also misinterpretations “oh he’s so richer than I, it can’t be legal” and public bashing (like the wrong public pointing of “supposed” pedophiles on facebook) ?
Isn’t that simply a kind of very simplicistic view of how it could be possible to fight against corruption ?
(And again, imho … open consultation of taxrolls is MUCH more important in that matter than fully disclosed bank accounts with the dream of transforming each citizen in a potential tax and financial inquirer)