On March 11^th, 400 people will gather in Mountain View, CA, to map out a new banking system fit for the Information Age, with new technologies, transparencies and values… at TEDxNewWallStreet.

Just down the street from Google, some of the brightest minds locally and internationally are coming together at the famed Computer History Museum to re-imagine banking for the Information Age at TEDxNewWallStreet on March 11, 2012. This audience routinely disrupts Industrial Age paradigms, and will be encouraged to do so for banking, by inventing new technologies and processes that make banking a game that people can win.

Mobile deposits and bill pay, online stock market quotes and trades show people will use technology to do the banking they used to do, faster. Re-imagining banking changes the guts of how money is created, priced, moved, saved and transparently tracked to its impacts.

More than 400 venture capitalists, serial entrepreneurs, technologists, inspired bankers, Stanford faculty and students, politicians from the San Francisco Bay Area and Pacific Northwest, and a global online live-stream audience in the thousands using Facebook, Google and Twitter are expected to attend TEDxNewWallStreet. Speakers will give talks on a number of topics, including:

• banking as a facet of civil rights so as to raise personal wealth,
• virtual/peer-to-peer banking,
• how bank technologies can protect customer identity and increase global sustainability,
• reframing how banks use customer data to price credit and investments, and
• how public finance accounting and bond offerings can evolve to value what matters to people and community in an economy.

Speakers on the day include Silicon Valley industry leaders and upstarts, venture capitalists (VCs) and serial entrepreneurs like Bill Harris, formerly of Intuit and now of Personal Capital; Joe Lonsdale and Rosco Hill of Palantir; Macarthur Fellow and European accountancy historian Jacob Soll; Peter Vander Auwera at SWIFT Innotribe and startup micro-investment entrepreneur Shivani Siroya of InVenture. Many more speakers will outline their “wish lists” for Information Age banks and banking, and how to build it now.

TEDxNewWallStreet is organized by Bruce Cahan, an Ashoka Fellow and Stanford University Engineering Visiting Scholar. Bruce is creating a new bank paradigm through his high-transparency, impacts-aware bank project, known as GoodBank™(IO). Living in Palo Alto, Bruce saw that as disruptive as Silicon Valley is, it was missing a huge opportunity to move banking from its Industrial Age camouflage to the Information Age paradigm for user experience, transparency and social media.  “Banking should be what customers co-create for their own needs, not the ‘one size fits all’ take it or leave it choices most banks today offer.  Given how iTunes^® and Spotify^® reimagined music distribution, how Netflix^® and Hulu^® changed movies and television, and how digital and subscription libraries are reducing the cost of knowledge sharing, banking creates frictions transactionally, regionally, environmentally and socially that no longer are justifiable, safe or inevitable.  We have an Internet of Things, let’s use it to re-imagine banks built in and for the Information Age.”

Business reporter Camilla Webster will serve as event moderator. Camilla is a seasoned, business journalist, writing for Forbes and Huffington Post, and is co-author of The Seven Pearls of Wisdom: A Woman’s Guide to Enjoying Wealth and Power.  “TEDxNewWallStreet is a solution-based, engaging, idea-generating conversation during a historic time in the finance industry” says Camilla, who as MC will guide speakers and audience on a novel journey.

This event is about financial innovation beyond the next cool mobile app. We will be looking for deep innovations that may dramatically impact the way we think about the function of a bank. It is an honor for the Innotribe team to be invited as speaker at TEDxNewWallStreet. It is a reflection of the Innotribe reputation and brand. My presentation is combining material from “How to make Babies” and “The Soul of Innovation”, complemented with brand new material on our research project “Digital Asset Grid”, and some new insights on innovation disruption levels. Just last week, I gave Bruce Cahan a preview of the draft presentation, and Bruce’s reaction was: “you’ll blow a few circuits with this one!”. Looking forward to this event with all my heart and in full support for Bruce Cahan’s cause.