Umair Haque has written an Open Letter to Google titled “Can Google take on Wall Street – and Win ?”

It starts with: “Dear Google,…”

and goes on with:

Every day, you handle more searches than the NYSE handles trades — and that difference, I’m guessing, is about to hit an order of magnitude more. Every day, you connect people, businesses, and communities in deeper and tighter ways than besuited beancounters do. From my tiny perspective, it seems that you just might be in the best position of any organization in the world to take on Finance 2.0.

Umair’s open letter is nothing more (or less) than

asking Google to implement

his Finance 2.0 Manifesto

written some months ago, and commented in this blog here. I strongly recommend to read the Manifesto.

And he continues:

What would a Googlier

finance industry resemble?

What would a more Googly set of capital markets look like? That’s the $12 trillion dollar question. After all, markets are just search engines — remember?

You still think you’re in the media business. You’re not. In the 21st century, everyone’s in the same business: the awesomeness business. It doesn’t matter what you make, as long as it offers maximum awesomeness. And right now, better finance would be pretty awesome.

Yesterday, you used to change the world. If you think a bit harder, a bit smarter, a bit more disruptively — you still can. If you don’t — well, the biggest catfish in a parched, dried up pond sure ain’t the smartest catfish.

And he gives some “leading” examples:

Tracked, ValueCruncher, StockTwits, and many more are the leading edge of a revolution — a revolution in what finance has been for the last several centuries, and what it must become in the 21st.

Something i don’t like in Umair’s post is the polarizing tone as if all in financials services is bad, and Google is “doing good” and Google being positioned as the solution to cure world hunger. Although i have already promoted many times on his blog that

polarization fosters innovation

Also, the “leading” examples offered above are putting Google in its traditional role of information manager, searcher of information.

I believe we could also look at Google as a utility. They have some great tools that could be applied in a big way to financial services. What if for example a neutral party would host a federated Google Wave as a SaaS solution for the financial market ? Running on a secure messaging platform like SWIFT ? Next generation person to person communication ? Or apply the same technology to do Collateral Margin calls for example ? Where every new call is a new Call “wave”. Think about it.

There is of course a lot i like in this article, especially the implicit push for extreme – even “impossible” innovation. Last week, i was attending the 11th European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. One of the keynotes came from Mark Raison, titled “The Power of Impossible”

Look at this presentation. Internalize it. And then let’s play-back Umair’s open letter with The Power of the Impossible in mind.

What would happen then ?

PS: Mark Raison is on my target speaker list for Innotribe @ Sibos 2010.