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Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders

Categories: Industry Index, Social MediaPosted on June 23rd, 2008

I’m here in NYC, one of the financial nerve centers in the world, attending Forrester’s Finance Forum. With loyalty to brands decreasing over time, companies need to figure out how to reach customers where they are, where many, are discussing their financial past, present and future online.

During today’s panel and speaker discussions, I heard a lot of trepidation, fear, and uncertainty from many of the brands. Most are answering the first two of the five questions (”what” and “why”) I use to gauge company sophistication. Some mentioned they want to toe-dip and get out if it didn’t work well, others mentioned they were monitoring, and some feel threatened by the peer to peer models that cut out the middle man.

The finance industry has a unique challenge, hindered by government regulations and often a conservative culture, they have a real challenge embracing the online conversation that’s already happening between customers.

Criteria: Although there are many finance startups and consumer review sites, this list is really about the financial institutions, large brands, and banks that are adopting social media to reach customers.

Ongoing list of Social Media in the Financial Industry

Wells Fargo
The first and greatest case study to date is of what Wells Fargo has done with their multiple blogs, starting with the Guided by History blog, Later, they launched the Student LoanDown blog, and a virtual world called Stagesoach Island Community that lets members learn and experience financial management.

H&R Block
This company has done quite a bit with blogs, virtual worlds, Facebook campaigns, and social media programs and campaigns. During tax time, there was a significant upswing of activity from Facebook applications, and they engaged in online dialog in Twitter by first monitoring keywords and directly responding to members.

Intuit
Online communities are nothing new to Intuit, this customer-focused brand let’s customers self-support each other, as well as communicate to them using blogs. Quickbooks (financial software) has extensive growth for SMBs who want to connect to each other.

Chase +1
This credit card company used Facebook to find out about what customers desired, laying the foundation for delivering a customer-focused product

Ernst & Young
This large accounting services and consulting firm is anxious to reach new hires fresh out of college, by creating a sponsored Facebook group, they have online dialogs with graduating students starting the interview process online. Smart way for each party to learn for each other.

Royal Bank of Canada
Launched this ongoing blog called the Innovator Blog, which goes back to October 2006. Link via Trevor Cook. Also, they’ve a Facebook page, (link from iljazz)

ING
Trevor Cook has more details, listing that ING has an Asia / Pacific blog, My Cup of Cha, a microfinance blog, and a Chinese blog. They’ve also created a microsite called I need to go, that has a spreadable widget.

Fidelity
Using map mashups and podcasts, Fidelity is reaching to it’s customers using new channels. (from Benjamin Ensor, Forrester)

Genworth
Springboardforum - From Genworth - you need to get an account to see it (free) “Genworth has partnered with Dow Jones, Time Inc., Bloomberg and Source Media to provide you with tools & resources that may support your business”(tip from Jay Bryant)

HSBC
This online community from HSBC Business Network is for SMB and entrepreneurs (tip from Jay Bryant)

Alberta’s Commonwealth
Online community for Alberta’s Generation Y provides a lifestyle platform for youth to self express and support called Young & Free.

Discover
This lifestyle portal provides helpful content for Discover customers, called Discover Edge, it delivers expert best practices for money management. It’s difficult to see if this has social features.

American Express
This website called OpenForum provides a dialog for customers, Chris Brogan has the details.

Capital One
This social network for small businesses, called Slingshot, allows people to connect to each other, promote their services, in this ‘yellow pages’ type of marketplace.

Canada’s Largest Credit Union, Vancity, launches blog
This blog, called Change Everything, is intended to spread feel good messages and videos to attract Vancity’s community, and interesting project.

MyVault by Scotia Bank
This ‘dashboard’ style interactive application allows members to manage their money, gather feeds, and communicate with community members via forums, called MyVault.

IT Counts by the Institute of Chartered Accountants
This community site ION, yields blogs by thought leaders on the topic of technology, sponsored by Microsoft.

Young & Free Alberta (Groundswell Award Winner, 2008)
The program launched in October 2007 with a two-month search and competition to find a dedicated Young & Free Alberta Spokesperson. The winner, Larissa Walkiw, became a paid employee of the credit union, working full time with the job description: talk, type and tell good stories. For her nine-month term, Larissa was essentially a full time blogger for the credit union. Learn about the award.

Charles Schwab (Groundswell Award Winner, 2007)
“In January 2007, Charles Schwab worked with Communispace to launch their “Money and More” private online community made up of 350 25-to-40 year old Generation X non-Schwab clients. Based on insights from the community, Schwab lowered account minimums to $1,000, introduced Schwab’s high-yield Investor checking account with a high yield, and developing an online landing page specifically for the Gen X target. Schwab has added 32% more Gen Xers YTD when compared to similar timeframes last year.” –see the award page

Who else? Leave a comment, of if you’re shy, send me an email. I’ll keep this updated until I can’t scale further

Related Resources

  • Social media for the insurance agency
  • Social media for the automotive industry
  • List of social media strategists and community managers at enterprise corporations
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    This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 3:19 am and is filed under Industry Index, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    49 Responses to “Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders”

    1. Amex and Social Media

      http://www.openforum.com/index.jspa

      (Do not work for Amex - no relation to Amex)



      2. Posted by Hans de Kraker on June 23rd, 2008 at 3:40 am

    2. I met a guy at ONA in Toronto last year who was online editor for the Federal Reserve Bank. He had been charged with figuring out how they could incorporate social media without giving away the bank, so to speak. I think I’ll follow up with him and report back.



      3. Posted by Angela Connor on June 23rd, 2008 at 3:50 am

    3. Here are two that often come up in conversation:
      - The Motley Fool’s CAPS
      - Reuters Stock Buzz (powered by SocialPicks)



      4. Posted by Eric Karofsky on June 23rd, 2008 at 4:18 am

    4. Angela, thanks, let me know if you’ve any reports.

      Eric, good examples, let me review.



      5. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on June 23rd, 2008 at 4:22 am

    5. Dude, Those are old-time financial behemoths re-engineering with social media - a good thing. Noticeably absent from list are sites like mint(TC40 winner last year), NYC based geezeo.com and the p2p lending sites (NYC based fynanz.com for student loans), social stock portfolio sharing sites (like NYC based covestor.com). Most of these are born from social media.



      6. Posted by Jim Hirshfield on June 23rd, 2008 at 4:24 am

    6. As we all know, banking and the financial industry as a whole can be, well, a bit conservative. In order to get them to understand the benefits of social media, there must be a strong ROI, especially in the wake of the many issues in financial markets. However, I do believe that through social media, it is a great opportunity for these companies to connect with their customer based and vice versa.



      7. Posted by L. on June 23rd, 2008 at 4:57 am

    7. Jeremiah,

      Based upon my experiences, there are a few extra inhibitors to the external facing adoption of web 2.0 in financial services.

      For listed financial services organisations there is an added constraint that communications disseminated by anyone in the company must be thoroughly sanitised in order to protect sensitive information leaking that may impact the share price.

      There are also only a limited amount of people that are allowed to contact the outside world on behalf of their organisation, without prior approval. This sort of formality is not very supportive of social networking principles and definitely not condusive to real-time discussions.

      As you allude to above, other inhibitors are that unlike other industry consumer based idea incubators (e.g. Dell ideastorm), financial services industry products are heavily regulated and the potential to differentiate is limited beyond fees, commission, tax inentives or performance (the relevant metric is based upon the type of product obviously). After all, it’s all about managing cash, debt and spreadsheets.

      Unless you’re the federal reserve or one of a few economic or trading geniuses, creating new types of cash based products is out of the question for most. :)

      Banks arguably have the best chance given they are obviously retail based and their sheer numbers mean they all need to seek some sort of differentiator even if it’s only for a brief period of time. I just hope it doesn’t become yet another tool for banks to pretend that they’re our “friend”. ;)

      I also suspect that there may be more non-retail based financial services organisations than there are retail and therefore the majority of the market has a need to communicate with a different type of customer, i.e. other financial services, intermediaries and general organisations.



      8. Posted by siddey on June 23rd, 2008 at 5:17 am

    8. In Spain we have some examples of the use of Social Media. An intersting exemple is Caja Navarra with their improvement of web 2.0. Their get the oppinion of their costumers about their invesment policy on social projects.
      (http://www.cajanavarra.es/es/)



      9. Posted by Marc Cortés on June 23rd, 2008 at 5:20 am

    9. Here are three more to add to the list:

      http://www.openforum.com - A site from American Express for their small business owners

      https://www.springboardforum.com - From Genworth - you need to get an account to see it (free)

      And: http://network.hsbc.co.uk/index.jspa - From HSBC for entrepreneurs



      10. Posted by Jay Bryant on June 23rd, 2008 at 5:35 am

    10. One I just found out about recently is ZeccoShare, though I haven’t really spent any time digging into it to see it’s positives/negatives or how many members it actually has.



      11. Posted by Jason Peck on June 23rd, 2008 at 6:12 am

    11. Also there’s
      Bankrate.com
      epinions has ratings
      and many others like mint.com



      12. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on June 23rd, 2008 at 7:19 am

    12. The mBank Portal — http://www.mbank.cz (not in English, ps) — which is branchless banking in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland attempts to maintain something of a blog — in Czech — but the posts, I’ve found, are rather inane and airy, and while the client numbers are rising nicely, +vely on fire in Poland. I suspect that people are ecstatic to just have branchless banking at their disposal as opposed to being told how to manage their money. There are options, in other words.

      Blogging, think they — who gives a hoot, at this stage, it would seem…



      13. Posted by Adam Daniel Mezei on June 23rd, 2008 at 8:10 am

    13. I don’t think this is on your list yet, but Capital One started a community called Slingshot. This SNS connects a group of small business owners with buyers and suppliers. Check it out



      14. Posted by mn_social_media on June 23rd, 2008 at 2:25 pm

    14. Jeremiah, you should visit our site, SmartyPig. It is the only true banking application that is social where you can invite your friends and family to be a part of your saving process. We also offer cash incentives from top retailers and one of the most competitive interest rates in the country (currently 3.90% APY). The platform itself is Web 2.0. SP utilizing blogs, Facebook, widgets and social networking applications, twitter and get satisfaction. We launched just a few months ago and already have users in all 50 states. Check us out. Thanks, Jon Gaskell, Co-Founder



      15. Posted by Jon Gaskell on June 23rd, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    15. Jeremiah,

      I really like your blog, but I must disagree with your having listed WF as the #1 social media savvy corporation. Their blogs are rarely edifying, and don’t really come from a significant place of authority. The entire SI feature could be replaced by 15 minutes in the presence of an informed adult, or their perfectly adequate FAQ. In fact, I would consider Wells Fargo the poster child for poorly conceived social media efforts. I will give them points for trying, and I don’t mean that sarcastically, but I don’t consider them a success in that arena. SouthWest, Adobe, Kodak and SmartyPig (above) are better examples IMO. (and I do like what H&RB has done with Twitter)



      16. Posted by Bo on June 23rd, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    16. Royal Bank of Canada is doing a few other things. Check out their Facebook initiative “RBC Bankbook”: http://tinyurl.com/6psktw

      RBC also has a group blog by students, RBC P2P:http://www.rbcp2p.com/index.asp



      17. Posted by Andrew Foote on June 23rd, 2008 at 8:19 pm

    17. You missed the programs that the team I led at Scotabank put together, including our podcast “The Money Clip” and the online community, MyVault. http://www.myvault.scotiabank.com

      I left the bank in January of this year, but those programs were forerunners to the other digital and social media efforts of Canadian FI’s.



      18. Posted by Michael Seaton on June 24th, 2008 at 9:38 am

    18. Hey Jeremiah, thanks for kind words!

      A couple of corrections: It’s “The Student LoanDown Blog”, not “low down”…although, nice name :-) and you had an “X” there. Did you mean to mention our Stagecoach Island Community? That’s a site in addition to the virual world–the blog/site supports users of the world. We also have a B2B blog, but it’s for customers only.



      19. Posted by Ed Terpening on June 24th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

    19. [...] Ongoing list of Social Media in the Financial Industry [...]



      20. Posted by Visa Joins Facebook. Gives $100 dollars to small business owners. « Social Media Meanderings on June 24th, 2008 at 8:13 pm

    20. Excellent post!

      It’s hard to introduce solutions based on new media or social media to financial brands. Somehow they’re quite conservative.
      I try to follow every interesting innovation in finance market.

      I would add to your list a very interesting social network for entrepeneurs in Europe:

      http://www.join2grow.biz/default.aspx#

      It is a community created and supported by Fortis Bank. One of the biggest banks in Western Europe.



      21. Posted by Stempniaked on June 25th, 2008 at 7:40 am

    21. [...] In a follow-up to yesterday’s blog post about VISA, Jeremiah Owyang now has an ongoing list of the social media efforts from banks, credit card, financial institutions and lenders. He’s [...]



      22. Posted by Fine Print » Blog Archive » Dominating The Conversation on June 25th, 2008 at 10:58 am

    22. Ed, thanks, I made the changes



      23. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on June 25th, 2008 at 8:49 pm

    23. Don’t forget about VanCity’s altrusitic endeavor: Change Everything

      TD Canada’S Money Lounge on Facebook

      and Visa’s recent facebook small business endeavour



      24. Posted by Sean moffitt on June 27th, 2008 at 7:06 pm

    24. The ICAEW’s IT Counts site at http://www.ion.icaew.com/itcounts sponsored by Microsoft is aimed at chartered accountants.



      25. Posted by Stuart G Hall on June 29th, 2008 at 11:15 am

    25. Jeremiah, The VanCity site is Change Everything not Change Anything.



      26. Posted by Ginny Brady on June 29th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    26. Hi Jeremiah
      Sorry for the late comment but I have something to add to ING. Last year they had a great campaign call “I need to go” in which you were able to download the campaign’s widget (toilet doors) to your blog’s sidebar.



      27. Posted by omer rosen on June 30th, 2008 at 6:59 am

    27. Omar, thanks I updated



      28. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 1st, 2008 at 4:51 am

    28. [...] need to figure out how to reach customers where they are, where many, are discussing their fhttp://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/06/23/ongoing-list-of-social-media-in-the-financial-industry…Add Listing: MarketPlace :TDWITDWI&39s marketplace displays an extensive listing of products and [...]



      29. Posted by listing marketplace on July 12th, 2008 at 11:04 am

    29. we have one in israel that we built for jerusalem bank.
      two blogs at the moment for international investment and stock market experts. the two is writing by top manegers from the bank.
      http://www.bankjerusalem-blogs.co.il/



      30. Posted by sagi che on July 22nd, 2008 at 7:43 am

    30. [...] Related: I did this same list for the Finance industry, see Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders [...]



      31. Posted by Insurance Industry Explores Social Media, But Nothing To Write Home About (Blogs, Forums, Social Networks) on July 24th, 2008 at 8:36 am

    31. [...] The retail world offers many examples of best practices. From great sites such as Mint.com, which can organize an individual’s financial accounts, to crowd-sourced investment ideas at the Motley Fool, there are a host of opportunities to gain from the wisdom of the crowd. Recently, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester listed many retail examples. [...]



      32. Posted by Molecular Voices » The Quarterly Earnings Call is Passé on July 31st, 2008 at 7:00 am

    32. Great post - v interesting- does anyone have any examples of social media initiatives in higher level finance organisations ie those that handle hundreds of millions of dollars investments.



      33. Posted by A J F Roberts on August 27th, 2008 at 11:38 pm

    33. Great, nice and interesting post.



      34. Posted by Facebook Application on September 8th, 2008 at 11:49 pm

    34. Another one from Visa that I just found:

      http://tinyurl.com/3lz2xt



      35. Posted by Jake McKee on September 29th, 2008 at 4:46 pm

    35. It’s very telling to see such institutions moving to social media. The opportunities to engage the customer through social media are almost as magnetic as when entire families sat glue to the TV set in the 1950s. As long as the content is enlightening, educational and/or entertaining, it’s not too hard to create an avalanche of raving fans.



      36. Posted by Dave Saunders on October 13th, 2008 at 8:36 am

    36. [...] Media by Industry: Auto, Finance, and Insurance. Need to find examples for your boss or client? These lists can [...]



      37. Posted by Jeremiah Owyang’s recommended web strategy reading « Beyond Digital Media on October 19th, 2008 at 4:30 am

    37. Jeremiah,

      I wanted to mention Banktastic.com to you as well. We’re trying to tackle the problem of a heavily regulated and generally conservative group by providing them a place of value for the banker themselves and hopefully, by seeing the potential of the medium, it encourages them to engage back outward to their user base in the way they feel comfortable.

      We market our platform out to state and national associations/groups to private connect to each other.



      38. Posted by Brad Garland on October 19th, 2008 at 7:13 am

    38. Some useful links to consider for my finance blog. Thanks.



      39. Posted by Andy on October 21st, 2008 at 10:43 am

    39. Hi Jeremiah, If you want an example of what NOT to do in social media for banking, the NAB uBank / MyFutureBank is a worthy case study. They began the SMM experiment, got scared by some bad blog and media publicity and pulled the whole shebang. I try to summarise the events on my blog at http://beyonddigitalmedia.wordpress.com/2008/10/17/social-media-star-killed-the-banking-experiment/



      40. Posted by Chris Bishops on October 27th, 2008 at 1:54 am

    40. Members Credit Union (Winston-Salem, NC) - What are you saving for? program: http://www.whatareyousavingfor.com



      41. Posted by Matt Davis on December 2nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm

    41. [...] Ongoing list of social media efforts from banks and other financial institutions (Case Study) [...]



      42. Posted by Updated: Resources for Digital Folk « Ka-Pow! on January 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am

    42. [...] Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders How does Jeremiah do it? More to the point, how does he find time to do it? (tags: socialmedia fintech banking banks jeremiahowyang) [...]



      43. Posted by links for 2009-02-20 « Brendan Cooper, your friendly neighbourhood social media strategist on February 20th, 2009 at 1:09 am

    43. Great list and very interesting - how about B2B based social media initiatives? - much of the financial services efforts are based on attracting interest and business from other financial institutions rather than consumers and I am yet to come across a bank using social media to acheive this ?
      anyoen got any ideas thoughts ?



      44. Posted by Andrew on February 24th, 2009 at 8:57 am

    44. Hello,

      Your list is very focused on traditional financial services (and the giant conglomerates in that category), but there are significant smaller players on the self-directed custodian side like PENSCO, Equity Trust, Sterling Trust, etc., making heavy use of blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter. Some links:

      http://www.selfdirectedira.com (PENSCO’s blog)
      http://www.trustetc.com/blog (Equity Trust’s blog)

      There are several groups on LinkedIn related to these companies — PENSCO group, Self-directed IRA group led by Entrust, IRAAA group (IRA Association of America).

      Lastly, want to put in a plug for my client Sterling Pacific Financial’s new blog:

      http://www.sterlpac.com/blog (Sterling Vision)

      They’re a real estate lender and trust deed investment company.

      Social media is really picking up for these smaller/mid-size companies at a faster rate than for the big guys, I suspect ….



      45. Posted by Laurie Morgan on March 11th, 2009 at 10:43 am

    45. [...] Research. Entre los post muy interesantes que publica descubro esta semana uno dedicado al uso de Social media en el sector financiero. Muy completa revisión de casos de éxito en Estados Unidos del uso de Internet como nueva forma [...]



      46. Posted by Guía Mundial de Países » Blog Archive » Zona Zapping 12 - 29 de junio de 2008 on March 14th, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    46. [...] Research, provides the most complete ongoing lists that highlight developments in the insurance and financial [...]



      47. Posted by Speaking of money: Financial service firms that give value « i scream social on March 15th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

    47. This is a truly great list. I’m doing some research on just this topic and found this truly useful. Let me know if you’re ever in london for catch up! twitter.com/JoshFeld



      48. Posted by Josh Feld on April 2nd, 2009 at 7:56 am

    48. ING also has a YouTube channel dedicated to their F1 Car

      http://www.youtube.com/user/INGExplains



      49. Posted by Denis on April 24th, 2009 at 6:52 am

    49. Declaration of interest here - tooting one’s own horn

      The Citywire Blog for UK financial advisers has fast become the industry’s watering hole where advisers discuss topics ranging from investments to technology and regulation. The UK’s regulatory authority, the FSA, has used it to get feedback on new initiatives.

      http://www.citywire.co.uk/adviser/-/blogs/the-new-model-adviser-blog/list.aspx



      50. Posted by Richard Lander on May 8th, 2009 at 8:34 am

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