More important is the fact that the Google platform and those who do understand the vision of Google and the way the Google business model works is highly interesting and a base that will redefine the financial services industry completely.

Of course it is already taking place. Are we talking about trust? The total break down of the financial sector, dragging along other markets, economies and countries, initiated by traditional banks with a business model that did not evolve since 1780, is that the trust we are looking for. Or is there a opportunity we allow new players that understand that in all aspects that technology influences not only the way we do business but also steers the culture, behavior of companies that are the new and leading companies of this century.
Indeed there are more reasons to trust companies that are open, transparant, aim for the best services and products at the lowest prices, preferably for free, over traditional companies whose core values are power, fear, ignorance and that are the opposite of open and transparant.

The revolution that overthrows whole business sectors and of which Google is one of the initiators without having the goal to obtain this result, enables (even demands) that people take control over their own financial life.
The banks of the future are community banks, owned by the account holder themselves using the traditional financial player only as their suppliers offering their products and services at a price that is calculated by the same community.

Google will be the facilitator and possibly the best ban independent bank, insurance company independent insurance company and pension institute independent insurance company.

Google wil be my house banker!

I think online transactions should be more about barter. Google could help with a global market a little more fluid than eBay, but similar. Get rid of money. Encourage production and trading. Spread the importance of computers and data. Yay, Google says. When the rice farmer can trade his rice for what he needs to nuture his family instead of being owned by a rice distributor, life is good.

Watch out middlemen! It’ll be your relationships that you can barter, who do you know? Banks’ll have to join with Google to be the keepers of the information.

Peace.

http://www.amazonbay.net

Might give you a few ideas.

Apparently lots of Chinese young people play the games and earn points which are then sold to incompetent or impatient gamers in the west. A Google bank could integrate the two worlds of “finance”.

In any case I think Google would be in a position to provide some middle ground for managing money for people who are not confined to one country. Even being able to make a simple international bank transfer could be greatly improved. Right now in order to transfer money I have to pay £20 to Barclays (UK) $15 to Bank of America plus 2% for currency conversion and wait three weeks. I have been trying to trick PayPal into helping me out but I am having difficulty getting it set up with my Barclay’s account…… another long story.

The Googley thing to do would be to seek innovations that make the whole banking business more efficient and better able to serve people’s needs. Googlers would figure that whatever makes the banking business better would help Google even if it also helps Google’s “competitors”. (A rising tide helps all boats — including Google’s) So, Google would address issues of the banking business’ infrastructure. For instance, you might see development of an open-source banking platform and the development of open-source banking applications. The idea would be that providing such a platform and apps would reduce the cost-structure of the business while also reducing cost of adoption of the new applications. Reducing cost of implementing new applications would tend to cause them to be more widely offered and thus tend to generate more demand for Google’s own implementations of the applications. Open sourcing the platform would encourage others to also build open-source apps on the same platform and thus make it easier for Google to expand its own services with applications which come from other platform users’ innovation.

bob wyman

When Google started to get into payments, PayPal responded with an aggressive expansion into global markets.

http://www.rohi.ee/ellakvere/?p=1674

Usually those governments criminalize all foreign currencies, but I never thought of cell phone minutes as currency. If there was a way to transfer them reliably, that would be great. Wealth could be stored safely abroad, yet easily accessed when needed. This could undermine many a kleptocracy.

Funny, you normally only get talk of alternative currencies from “gold standard” obsessives. Nice to see the idea can sprout up elsewhere.

1st G would give open access to all rate and fees info, fully transparent. Would explain, for instance, how the bank actually makes more money on FREE checking than it does on traditional checking, and who pays.

1st G would link to outside, objective advisory info, viewing that as a valuable service rather than a risk.

No doubt, 1st G would also innovate new products that would be lower cost because they would be built from algo-scratch rather than chiseled and polished legacy bricks.

Most important, though, you’d have much less risk of the chain of rationalization that allowed the whole subprime travesty to unfold because of that little nagging “no evil” screen that would set off the bs whistles at the first attempt to pass the risk upstream.

Or so I’d hope. And wish.

See (bear with me), right now there are several bank transfer networks with different features and limitations. The one ATMs use is called Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and the one used by banks and the Fed for check clearing is called Automated Clearinghouse (ACH). ACH has in the last few years been totally overhauled but the Fed didn’t do a very good job of it – it’s poorly architected from an access point of view and so its totally opaque to account holders. (As, arguably, it should be.)

A lot of banks will charge an overdraft for a transaction conducted on EFT, even though ECH conveys balance data to the issuing machine BEFORE a transaction is approved. (ACH has never supported such a feature.) So a bank is ripping off its customers when it does that, because it explicitly approved the transaction in an account it KNEW had insufficient funds. It’s a source of considerable anger among bank customers.

As a bank, Google could open up access to multiple banks through a single interface and single card. There were startups back around 2000 and 2001 that wanted to do this (i.e. Yodlee), but none of them were able to lock it up. Google probably could.