I am a huge fan of Glenbrook Partners, the Menlo Park-based payments consulting firm. I first visited them when I was transitioning from closed to open blogging in 2006. Scott Loftesness and company were enormously helpful back then even though I was potentially elbowing in to their space. It's a kindness you never forget. I look forward to my daily dose of PaymentsNews and the occasional meetup at conferences.

But I'd never had a chance to attend one of their presentations until two days ago at NACHA Payments 2010. What a treat. Partners Erin McCune and Russ Jones drew the dreaded 8 AM Monday slot in a breakout session immediately preceding the Jack Dorsey/Square keynote. So only a 100 or so lucky attendees got to see them knock it out of the park. 

And as much as I enjoyed seeing Square and Wells Fargo's Steve Ellis go at it on the big stage, Russ and Erin would have delivered more value to attendees. They took a nebulous and confusing topic, alt-and-social payments (see inset), and made sense out of it in a 68-slide deck (see table and chart below). Let's all agree to use these terms going forward.

And to top it off, Glenbrook closed the presentation by showing alt-payments in use in the real virtual world at my favorite virtual pet site, Foopets (see previous post and note 1).  

Luckily, you still have a chance to hear an expanded version of this talk via Glenbrook's live webinar next week on social payments (small registration fee required).  

Glenbrook Partners deciphers Web 2.0 payments terms...

...and it's created a social payments classification system

Source: Erin McCune and Russ Jones, Glenbrook Partners presentation at NACHA Payments 2010, April 26, 2010
(reprinted with permission)

Playing Foopets costs money...

...but young gamers hitting the FooBank have more payment options than just their parents' cards
Note: We previously covered Kwedit here

Note:
1. Glenbrook says that virtual pet owners spend about the same on their virtual pets, $25/mo, as real-world pet owners spend on their real-live pets. Amazing! If only Pets.com had thought to sell virtual dog food instead of the real stuff, we might still get to see the sock puppet all over Facebook.

You don't often see banking and fun in the same sentence. According to Google site search, I've used the word fun 58 times in six years of blogging here. It usually appears in a negative sense, for example, when this or that task is "no fun" (see note 1).

A guest post in TechCrunch this weekend got me thinking about it. The author, Gabe Zichermann, who's literally written the book on the subject, led with the provocative statement:

What if everything we did was a little more fun?

He even cited Chase as a large brand trying to add more fun to their offerings. And though he provided no specifics on Chase's efforts, he did detail his thoughts on how FedEx could use game mechanics to make tracking shipments more enjoyable.

According to Merriam-Webster, fun is:

what provides amusement or enjoyment

By that definition, there is hope that the online and mobile channels are at least making banking tasks relatively more enjoyable than they were pre-Internet.

So how do we make banking more fun?

1. Reduce money worries: Financial stress hits every demographic segment. Is my money safe? Have I paid my bills on time? Do I have enough in my account to last until the next paycheck?

Ideas: Real-time alerts, mobile apps, dashboard controls, red/yellow/green indicators, location-based check-in to authorize a card transaction before you've even reached the counter

2. Create mobile magic: The best way to get someone excited about a new channel is to prove that it has new benefits, and it's mobile's time to shine.

Ideas: Deposit checks or capture receipts via mobile phone camera, 4-digit login, shake to logout, scan barcode to comparison shop, bump to pay

3. Make it a game: Make financial chores into a game you can win by making good choices (see last week's post on In and Out Cash).

Ideas: Allow users to keep score against themselves and peers; earn points, honors, badges and discounts for credit-score improvements, savings gains, debt reductions and other measures of financial fitness and goal achievement

4. Keep score: Utility companies provide valuable score-keeping metrics on their monthly statements where at minimum you can see how your energy/water consumption compares to the same period a year ago.

Ideas: It should be easy to see how spending patterns compare to the previous year (a basic PFM function), as well as where your savings stand, how many times you've been late with a bill, how your credit score has changed and so on.

Note: There really is a Funbank.com. It's a kid's banking/shopping portal that says "patent pending" and "copyright 2003," so it may not be operational. Many links, including About Us, were broken (29 March 2010)