Kristin Moyer

Mary Knox here. I have been giving myself a crash course on the use (or potential use!) of mashups by banks in preparation for my involvement in this year’s SIBOS, which will include a mashup stream in the innovation track. I’ve started blogging about mashups in banking on the SWIFT community site.

The growing interest of the SWIFT community in mashups is in itself interesting, because of a key characteristic of mashups: they are oriented around community. As Anthony Bradley and David Gootzit note in a recent research report, The Five Core Principles of Enterprise Mashups, mashups are Web 2.0 and conform to the Web 2.0 “architecture of participation” principle. To quote, “Mashups capitalize both on the community of systems as mashable sources … and on the community of people.”

And what is SWIFT, but a community – a community of banks, other financial service providers, and their customers and counterparties.

I’ve been hearing hype around mashups for quite some time, but the actual use by banks has seemed low, mostly for things like showing the location of ATMs or bank branches on interactive maps. There are exceptions – financial social networks, like Mint, have been using these capabilities to offer account aggregation and financial advice.

Yet the use of mashups, which Gartner defines as Web technology-based lightweight composite applications created by sourcing capabilities from established content and systems functionality, may provide significant business value for banks. This stems from three other key characteristics of mashups:

1. Use existing data and functionality to create new, lightweight applications. Business benefits: faster time to market, low(er) cost due to reuse
2. Bring together multiple sources of data and functionality in an almost limitless array of possibilities. Business benefits: higher productivity, efficiency and accuracy; improved decision making
3. Can be rapidly assembled to focus on the unique requirements of individual users. Business benefits: improved  user (customer!) responsiveness and satisfaction

It will be interesting to see if the SWIFT community can put energy into mashups for financial services.