eBay in the Microfinance business.

MicroPlace.comA friend recently sent me an article in BusinessWeek about eBay’s Microfinance engine. The article, EBay: The Place for Microfinance, speaks of eBay’s 2006 acquisition of MicroPlace.com.

MicroPlace.com’s mission is “to help alleviate global poverty by enabling everyday people to make investments in the world’s working poor.” Pretty impressive.

Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, is also an investor in Kiva.org, which is a similar site for investing small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

MicroPlace.com fits eBay’s direction so nicely, and takes advantage of their infrastructure to do good in the world. Nice to see big players enabling Microfinance and bringing it to the masses. That’s doing well by doing good.

Speaking at CUES Experience.

CUES ExperienceI’m excited to be going to Minneapolis in May to speak at the new CUES Experience: Immersion Learning for Marketing, Technology & Operations Leaders. This is a new conference CUES is putting on, and they’re planning on mixing a traditional conference with on-site visits to some of the more innovative companies in Minneapolis.

They have some amazing speakers lined up, including Arkadi Kuhlmann from ING Direct, Jeremy Gutsche founder of trendhunter.com, Steve Williams and Terence Roche of Cornerstone Advisors and GonzoBanker.

But, I’m especially excited to meet one of my favourite bloggers, Ron Shevlin.

Plus I’ve never been to Minneapolis, so that should be very fun. I’ll do my best to live blog it as well.

An online community about banking? Really?

Ever wondered where bankers go to discuss financial services issues online. Well neither had I, but then Brad Garland of The Garland Group invited me to join Banktastic.com.

What’s Banktastic? Here’s how the site positions itself:

A community helping bankers quickly find relevant, industry specific information and share it with others.

It could just as easily have been called CreditUnion-tastic, but that’s just not as much fun. People are discussing all kinds of issues like:

  • Who will win the p2p lending wars in the US – Prosper, Zopa, LendingClub, Virgin?
  • What is your favorite bank marketing campaign of all time?
  • Just wondered what some of our experts thought the next big thing will be in banking? I still meet with smaller banks that think that remote deposit capture is new and they have a problems getting a good marketing plan created. Any ideas?

The site is in “semi-private beta” which means you need to be invited to join. I still have one invite left, let me know if you want it.

Thanks to Brad and Mark (I was fortunate enough to meet them at BarCampBankSeattle earlier this year) and the gang at The Garland Group for creating this forum. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

UPDATE: I neglected to give my friend and CU influencer, Morriss Partee his due props here. His EverythingCU is a great repository of information about all things Credit Union. They have 5,621 members (including me) and have tons of topics and discussions daily about all kinds of topics, ranging from

  • Getting management approval for cutting edge campaigns
  • Auto Lending Channels
  • Philosophy and Practice
  • Web Site Re-design
  • The best ad you NEVER Ran
  • Name change?
  • You know you’re a marketer when…

It’s an amazing resource, and I owe it to Morriss to give him a plug along with Banktastic.