BarCampBank continues East, West and South.

BarCampBank in San Francisco & New EnglandLast summer I attended an amazing event called BarCampBankSeattle. It was a coming together of, and collaboration between, some amazing bank and credit union folks from across North America. I wrote a few blog posts about it at the time.

Jesse Robbins organized this first-of-its-kind-in-America conference, and now he’s written about two more BarCampBank events that are happening. It was also covered by NetBanker and Frederic Baud.

The next two events will be:

BarCampBank San Francisco
Saturday, March 29, 2008
UC Berkeley campus – Soda Hall in the Wozniak Lounge
RSVP @ EventBrite ($25)

BarCampBank New England
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
America’s Credit Union Museum, Manchester, NH

And now I see that there will be a BarCampBank Dallas. This is spreading like wildfire. Innovation is taking root among some bankers, which is exciting. Hmmm, maybe we need a BarCampBank Vancouver…

Unfortunately, I can’t attend any of these events, although I truly wish I could. Lots of great people will be there, and you can see exactly who will be attending at each event’s homepage.

I hope some of you attendees will blog about it, so the rest of us can feel included. It is worth noting that Morriss Partee is behind a couple of these and seems to be the thread between SF and NE. Morriss, looks like you’re gonna need to go to Dallas too.

Virgin Bank of Canada?

When it rains it pours. First IOU Central opens up as the first social lending platform in Canada, and now Richard Branson has announced, somewhat coyly, that he will be moving his Virgin Money brand into Canada.

All the problems and frustrations that people find in the mobile-phone industry they also find in the banking industry here. The banking industry is ripe for a strong competitor here.

All of this, and CommunityLend is still moving forward to their early 2008 launch. Makes me think that Canada will have a very different financial landscape before 2008 is up. Quite a game changer…

IOU Central is Canada’s first social lending platform.

IOU CentralFor all my interest and excitement about social lending, I have not been able to use a social lending platform because there wasn’t one available in Canada. Then, this morning, I read on NetBanker that IOU Central has launched, making them first out of the gate for Canadians.

I had heard that there was a group in Quebec working on this, but I had assumed my friend Colin Henderson would be first out to market with CommunityLend, which is launching early this year.

I’ll give IOU Central a try and report what I find. As I’ve written before, my main question, one that is about to be answered, is: will Canadians who love to hate their five main national banks engage in social lending, or will we complain but stay put?

Interesting times…