| Excellent stuff!
From one point of view, Mint effectively removes the vendor from the equation. Will the customer service representatives in the banks ever even know their client uses Mint to understand their personal finances?
The monetization models here are often based on making the vendors pay. With a little bit of over dramatizing, "because they owe it to us".
But is the fast lane to VRM applications in letting vendors do what they do, and use API:s to remove the vendor dependency from the equation, and just create API-driven services that simply make the users feel like they get all the attributes Liz listed in the other thread? (Convenience, choice, price, save time…)
As little as we want vendors to identify us as individuals without our consent, as little do I actually as a consumer care about which vendor provides that magic formula of convenience, choice, price, save time etc.
What Graham Hill touched upon in the MVP of VRM thread, first mover advantage today is not relevant any longer, because it has never been easier to jump ship as soon as a better ship comes along.
Aggregating API's and help the users find value for themselves without being dependent on vendors to get on the VRM train, golden!
"But to me the Mint model of aggregating existing API’s seems like a faster route to standing something up. "
+1 for aggregating existing API's from my narrow UX point of view.
/Sakari
On 28.6.2013, at 7.59, "T.Rob" <
">
> wrote: > [Banks] have gotten really good at protecting people's money… FWIW, banks aren’t very good at all at protecting people’s money. It’s just that paying for a certain level of background breaches and fraud is cost effective so they allow it to continue. They’ve pretty much all been breached but as long as they can spread the costs over a large population and pass them on to you they don’t bother to implement better security. These are the *last* people I want protecting my personal data and definitely not the standard with which I want to measure potential candidates. See below. Scale and trust, definitely yes. But I think there’s an aspect of this that is missing. Mark’s premise was he doesn’t want to self-host. That implies vendor-hosted solutions but not necessarily *consolidated* vendor-hosted solutions. For example, the folks at http://mint.com provide a consolidated view over all your accounts by integrating with all the banks and brokerages that you use. The banks and brokerages remain the systems of record but Mint gives you a single pane of glass and a consolidated view. Mint makes a bank’s API more valuable. Once you have Mint and want to establish a new account, any chance you’ll choose an institution with which Mint cannot integrate? No. Is Mint the system of record? No. But to the user, it’s all one seamless database. (Or at least that’s the vision and it’s pretty good at delivering that from what I hear.) A rather ambitions VRM aggregator can play the Mint game (or Mint can expand) and integrate to Square Tag, Smart Things, IFTTT, Amazon, iTunes, Land’s End, Dillards and Lowes and Home Depot (who send you e-receipts), devices like Nest and Schlage locks, loyalty programs, and so on. All your data on a single pane of glass, but the database is virtual and federates all the systems of record as back-ends. But, like Mint, they’d better hold their security to a higher standard than some of the systems of record with whom they integrate. The added security in this approach is that the data remains spread out over all the back-end systems rather than consolidated in one place. The data usage patterns of regular users accessing their accounts look MUCH different than a hacker trying to dump all the data at once. So anyone trying to obtain data in bulk must maintain an active presence for a very long time and this greatly increases the level of difficulty. There’s also the advantage of not having to collect, store, manage and protect all that data in a custodial role. Personal Cloud hosting as the system of record may in fact be a viable model. But to me the Mint model of aggregating existing API’s seems like a faster route to standing something up. Of course, the fastest route is whatever someone actually *doing* the work decides it is so, for the second time to night, this may not be worth the bits it’s written in. I’m not an investor nor much of a coder. Take this with a grain of [rock] salt. -- T.Rob One in Four Customers Are Card Fraud Victims, Study Finds Study: Debit card fraud rampant Another Huge Cash-Out Scheme Revealed Why Banks Pay for ATM Cash-Outs $45 Million Cash-Out: What Happened? Two Southern California Men Plead Guilty for Their Roles in a Nationwide Breach of Credit and Debit Card Terminals at Michaels Stores Inc. TWO BALTIMORE COUNTY MEN SENTENCED FOR BANK LARCENY RELATED TO PHONY ARMORED CAR COURIER HEIST Bank of America Breach Leads Roundup TD Bank Security Breach May Have Affected 260,000 Customers Rock River Valley's Alpine Bank hit with security breach From: Adam Carson [mailto:adamkcarson@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2013 11:44 PM
To: Doc Searls
Cc: ProjectVRM list
Subject: [projectvrm] Re: Personal Clouds, big company help, and sanity sorry for chiming in late... although banks do make sense to host personal clouds and digital safety deposit boxes, i think they are a little scared to do so. they have gotten really good at protecting people's money, but protecting data/information is an entirely different thing and very risky. if all of a bank's customers trust them with their data, then there is a breach (potentially out of the bank's control) it leave the bank in a very precarious position. i think that amazon or dropbox or apple might try it...maybe Salesforce? someone with scale and trust would definitely help In his post "Who Will Host My #PersonalCloud?"...
<http://www.discoveringidentity.com/2013/05/01/who-will-host-my-personalcloud/>
... Mark Dixon reviews his digging into personal clouds following an exchange with @Windley and myself on Twitter. He adds,
> I do like the concept of personal clouds. I have experimented a little bit with Phil’s personal cloud infrastructure at Kynetx. The orange SquareTag in the upper right area of this blog is an artifact of my little experiment to tag my social media places with SquareTags and connect them to my personal cloud hosted by Kynetx.
>
> But my question still remains: What companies will emerge as the leading hosters of personal clouds? I don’t want to host my own; I don’t think my wife, as bright as she is, would learn how to do it.
>
> I would like my personal cloud to be hosted by a capable institution I trust. I would like Identity credentials I select from my personal cloud to be recognized by every website I choose to visit, and I would like the payment method I choose from my personal cloud to be accepted by every vendor I purchase things from. That will require broadly accepted standards for Identity and payments and the large-scale infrastructure to make it work.
>
> I tend to think that it will take some pretty large organizations to pull that off.
>
> My vote for an institution to host my personal cloud? My bank. It already has a vault full of things that are like analog personal clouds – safe deposit boxes. I choose what goes in my box and what comes out. The bank can’t get it without my key.
>
> Plus, my bank provides a whole litany of payment options. And, I tend to trust them to take are of my money. Perhaps I could trust them with my digital safe deposit box as well. I’d even be willing to pay for it.
>
> Will they do it? That is another question.
>
So let's answer it.
For help with that, I'm cc'ing Adam Carson, who I know is on the list but might otherwise miss this. Anybody else in the banking business, or one with similar heft (e.g. PayPal, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft) is also invited to weigh in. In addition to everybody, of course. :-)
I believe personal clouds are sufficiently protean as a concept (and as code bases) that anything can happen here. Obviously we need one or more big players to handle trusted interactions at the B2B level. Whether they need to hold all our personal data is a different question.
We tend to conceptualize stuff in terms of containers. (Hence personal data stores, lockers, vaults, etc.) Naturally, we tend to look for help from the biggest possible containers, or trusted containerizers.
But all our data is *already* containerized, whether in our own hard drives, memory sticks or whatever — and off in the clouds of our many service providers, from health care to banking to retail. They are not integrated with each other, or with us. And that's the problem, the pain point, that personal clouds, perhaps alone, can solve.
That's because key, as Joe Andrieu put it well almost five years ago...
<http://blog.joeandrieu.com/2007/06/14/vrm-the-user-as-point-of-integration/>
... is the individual as the point of integration.
Identity, or what's behind it, also matters, because that needs to be integrated as well, and we're the only ones in a position to do that.
We are "committees of the whole," as Kim Cameron puts it. Who we are to our spouses, our friends, our kids, even to ourselves, at different times and in different settings, is many different people in many different roles. Keeping them aligned behind the first person singular pronoun is what we call sanity. That's why having our data, and our very selves, sharded off into multiple silos over which we have no control, is not sane.
So think of personal clouds as a kind of shrinking. :-)
Doc
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