There's an interesting new buzzword in tech sources, crowdsourcing. You can probably guess the meaning: having users perform tasks that directly assist the business such as creating the core content (eBay, Flickr), editing the content (Wikipedia, Craigslist's "flag this entry"), or adding value to it (blog comments, trackbacks).

It's not a concept that lends itself to financial services, or does it? Marketocracy <marketocracy.com> is a website where 55,000 users run their own "mutual funds," beginning with one million in play money provided by the site (click on inset for screenshot). There is nothing particularly unusual about that as many brokerages and websites allow users to create model portfolios to track.

However, it's what Marketocracy does with these 65,000 user-generated portfolios that makes it innovative. It created a real mutual fund that tracks the portfolios of the 100 most accurate stock pickers in its user base. The Masters 100 Fund (MOFQX) <funds.marketocracy.com> has averaged an 11.65% annual gain since inception (Nov. 5, 2001) vs. 5.76% for the S&P 500.

Financial institution opportunities
While turning customers into investment advisers is a bit of a stretch for most traditional financial institutions, there are more mainstream functions that could be outsourced to end users. For example, a community calendar that users could update in real-time (wiki). Or a personal finance forum where customers post questions or describe their financial situation and solicit advice from other bank customers. To make it more credible, the bank could "vouch" for respondents with some type of "reputation" score. Prizes could be offered to the most interesting questions and/or answers to help spur adoption.

How about having customers design your ads? MasterCard tapped into the popularity of its "priceless" ad campaign with a "create your own priceless ad sweepstakes" earlier this year. The much-parodied ads are so widely followed that MasterCard has a dedicated website where the ads run <priceless.com> (see inset).

Really heading out of the box, how about creating a lending environment that combines the portfolio-management skills of Marketocracy with the person-to-person lending platform of Prosper? Masked loan applications could be posted online and users could choose which loans to fund and at what rates. Actual loan performance would be tracked over time, and the best virtual "loan officers" would receive recognition and prizes (and maybe a job offer). Taking this one step further, why not let the amateur loan officers put actual skin in the game, participating in the loans that were funded through the online loan market.

--JB