Infosecurity Europe 2012: the aftermath

It's April, torrential rain is the order of the day and the tubes are on the blink, which can only mean one thing: security professionals and hacks were making their way to Earls Court this week for Infosecurity Europe.

Phew! That was my first Infosecurity Europe and, whilst it was enjoyable and informative, the huge number of vendors in attendance and vast array of seminars and conference sessions made it a somewhat overwhelming experience. A colleague told me that it's all about the spectacle and now I see what they meant. Many of the stands were among the biggest and most elaborate you could wish to see at a trade show. The downside of this is that the bigger companies can drown out the smaller players, many of whom often have interesting, innovative solutions on display.

I'll save the indepth review for the next issue of FStech, but for the meantime some random thoughts/highlights.

I was expecting the show to be busier. The first two days apparently pulled in 12,490 visitors and almost 200 press attendees. But, while it was standing room only at some of the conference sessions, it was pretty quiet on the exhibition floor at times. Perhaps some people were put off by the inclement weather?

I had childhood flashbacks when I found out that the man, the legend Roy Walker was on the SafeNet stand. Roy had dusted off Mr Chips and was inviting visitors to play Catchphrase, with two games in the morning, two in the afternoon and the four winners then going head to head to play Super Catchphrase. All together now: "It's good, but it's not right."

Trade shows are like buses. You wait ages for one to come along and then three turn up at the same time. It was a shame that three exhibitions/conferences were scheduled at exactly the same time this week. TradeTech and Internet World both looked good, but when push comes to shove you have to go with Infosecurity Europe.

Twitter steals march on Facebook in FS sector

Has Facebook had its day? That was the question I put to my many (ahem) Twitter followers recently. "Timeline looks clunky and there are only so many pics you wanna see of friends pulling amusing faces in the pub," I tweeted.

It certainly seems to be on the slide in the financial services sector. According to analysis from Corporate Insight, Twitter has overtaken Facebook to be become the top social network for FS firms. It covered 90 companies in its report, 57 per cent of which used Facebook in 2010 and 51 per cent Twitter. But by the end of 2011, 88 per cent were on the former and 92 per cent on the latter.

At one point, Facebook could do no wrong, but it's no longer a media darling. Take, for example, the bemused response to the $1 billion purchase of Instagram, perhaps best summed up by a spoof news piece in the latest Private Eye. Sample quotes: "Instascam's business model was founded on the belief that if we had a trendy name and could show that we had no way of generating profit, Facebook would eventually buy us for some ridiculous price." And: "Mark Zuckerberg denied he'd overpaid for Instascam saying he'd been impressed by the way the company had generated huge amounts of hype in the past two years."

For more info on the Corporate Insight research, click here.

Like-for-like

Regular readers of this blog (there are some of you out there, I'm sure of it!) will know that I used to be Editor of FStech's sister title, Retail Systems.

I recently had lunch with a contact from my retail days and somewhat inevitably conversation turned to retail technology vs FS technology. "I'd imagine there is a lot less innovation in the financial services sector than there is in retail," said the contact, his logic being that, with many of the big financial institutions, it's a case of throwing large amounts of cash at  legacy transformation projects. Retailers, on the other hand, have less money to play with and so sweat the small stuff, which is where true innovation lies.

Regular readers will also know that the 2012 FStech Awards took place last month. It was my first awards and it was interesting to compare the entries to those received during my time as head of the judging panel for the Retail Systems Awards. There were indeed a number of entries detailing projects which were immense in scale but not particularly innovative. But at the same time, there were lots of examples of how financial institutions are making innovative and effective use of technology in such areas as social media, mobile banking, payments, cloud computing and green IT.

To cut a long story short, the FS tech sector is just as innovative (arguably more so in several areas - e.g. social media and mobile) as retail.  By way of example, I offer up a U.S. Bank project which involves employees piloting an iPhone app that uses augmented reality technology. The Find US+ app enables users to locate the bank's branches and ATMs. When pointed in a specific direction, the phone displays a computer-generated graphic for each location, its address and distance based on the user's GPS location. Each graphic is colour-coded to reflect whether the location is open, closing in an hour or closed. The app recognises when the user arrives at the destination and asks if additional information is requested. It also provides the best route and hours of operation.

There's a video on the bank's YouTube channel demonstrating the technology. It can be found here.

How cool is that?

Flip-flopping on social media

Investment information portal, assetinum, recently examined the world's 50 biggest private banking and wealth management institutions' social media activities, scoring them out of 100. The results weren't great.

A third of those under examination did not have an active Facebook profile and that included Facebook investor Goldman Sachs. D'oh! (insert muppets joke here).

Further info on the research at the FStech website.