by Myers Dupuy – president, cbanc Network
In the banking industry, every banker sits on their own personal gold mine of knowledge, best practices, policies, spread sheets, vendor experiences, etc. What if all of a sudden every banker got access to everyone else’s work? Imagine how much money they could save, benefitting from all the new ideas they would each have to improve their business – it would change the way everyone does their jobs. The playing field could finally be leveled for small and large banks alike.
But that doesn’t happen, does it? The reasons are purely human nature: Between being too busy, leery of posting items on open discussion forums, protective of the time invested in a project, and reluctant to have their work fall into their competitors’ hands, few are inclined to relinquish their intellectual property online.
Through trial and error over the past three years, cbanc Network has built a model that addresses all of these natural concerns, and we have successfully convinced risk-averse, low-tech, competitive business professionals to proactively, willingly share their best work online.
cbanc works on a free market concept, where bankers ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ intellectual property using points instead of dollars. People are incented to share because the more they sell, the more points they earn to buy what they need. No one gets taken advantage of. No one can free load. Users can hide their content from their competitors. This is an online portal that is safe, secure, and certain to help save banks time and money. Everyone wins.
While the platform creates engaged users, introducing the points economy increases the back-office complexity. All of the sudden, you have to think about micro-economic factors that can influence members’ usage, such as point inflation, point velocity and ensuring that the value of the content sufficiently backs the points.
With positive growth and adoption from a normally risk-adverse industry, cbanc is now the largest repository of banker-authored, board-approved, exam-tested content on the Internet. Is this the next generation for social media engagement, i.e. a LinkedIn on steroids? Hard to say. Our takeaway in the end is that the word ‘collaboration’ can have real meaning and impact if structured in a way that resonates with users.