Yes, banks are jumping on to the design wagon. Barclays, for instance has just rolled out a new branch in Manchester post its makeover. This branch gives you the feeling that you’ve just waked into a high street store. Be it an illuminated globe with rolling film footage suspended above its entrance or a designated play area for children, Barclays claims to have “listened” to its customers and arrived at this design. The lady behind this makeover, Deanna Oppenheimer has experience in revamping retail banking previously too. While at Washington Mutual, after studying ways to draw customers to branches, she and her team came up with the Occasio concept. These branches did away with traditional tellers and their windows. They were replaced with khaki-clad “concierges” who direct people to where they need to go according to what the customers need. They may be directed to one of the “teller towers,” circular help desks where they can conduct their own business or talk to an employee, or may end up at one of the touch screen service areas where they can research products and services or at a computer that will help them conduct online banking. Or they could plunk themselves on one of the private chairs and tables set up so employees can meet with customers to discuss issues that require privacy. So why so much attention to branches when everyone’s doing all that they can with mobiles and the Internet? Because the most expensive of banking products, like investments and insurance are sold over the counter, we’re told. More here.

Banking solutions in rural India are about to get a new lease of life with a wireless technology solution deployed by NXP semiconductors. Already tested as a pilot in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, this path-breaking technology involves a banking representative carrying a mobile phone, a smart card reader and a finger-print reader and going to villages where people can use these to make transactions. The incorporation of the finger print recognition was necessary since a lot of the population in rural India is illiterate and does not use signatures. So will this open up a whole new world of possibilities for rural India? Slowly, but surely. With Indians being very comfortable with mobile phone technology, avenues such as these will only see them take a step towards their own convenience. SBI, one of the banks who have tried this technology already has a wide reach in the country with the maximum number of ATMs. This kind of technology will only see it reach reaching further. A recent interest from State Governments in this technology can also see a possible extension to employee and pension schemes. So not just banking, rural India could get a lot going for them on the mobile phone.

Janet Bodnar, a known face in financial expertise has always come out strongly about letting kids use credit cards. In a three year old article on Kiplinger, where Bodnar serves as a deputy editor, she spoke about how teaching kids smart money management does not necessarily mean that they need to use a credit card. So how big is the market for young (or maybe much too young) credit card users? Pretty big, we’d think. We stumbled upon a website called Credit Card for Kids, claiming to give advice to kids and their parents about what credit card is best for them. All this, under the umbrella of “encouraging responsible spending”. But when should kids be taught about responsible spending? Agreed that parents might want to take this step when their young ones are about to go away to college and start living on their own, but would kids younger than that also use credit cards as responsibly? Or even debit cards for that matter? Lloyds TSB was recently criticized for issuing Visa Debit Cards to kids aged between 11 and 15 years after a father caught his 15-year old boy buying Viagra, cigarettes and a fake id over the internet with the debit card. Maybe it’s time to go back to the old school of hard cash to teach our kids a thing or two about money.

If it wasn’t bad enough that stores were already tracking the purchase decisions and buying patterns of their customers, it now seems that Philips is developing a way for stores to track the interests of people who haven’t even come inside. Using a set of video cameras and eye tracking software the system will be able to tell what someone looking at a window display has been staring at the longest, and will then provide more detailed information about the product via a passive, or even interactive, video display, in hopes it will push them towards making a purchase decision. From OhGizmo.

For the sixth year in a row, Logo Lounge has their annual round of logo trends. And unlike in the past where a new trend would emerge when Photoshop or Illustrator would unveil a new filter, this year is different. So here goes logo trends 2008.

A debate is raging in the direct marketing, promo and media agencies around the world about how so many of the awards in their categories have gone to mainline agencies? The Grand Prix in all three categories were won by mainline agencies. JWT Mumbai winning in direct, BBDO New York winning the promotion grand prix and Sweden’s Forsman & Bodenfors taking home the top media prize with their MMS campaign for AMF Pensions.

A look at the gold winners in direct and things don’t change too much. Couple of golds for Lowe Bangkok and one each for JWT’s London and Costa Rican offices. The only “non mainline” agencies to have won golds are new-age integrated agencies, BMF Sydney, MortierBrigade from Brussels and The Communications Agency from London. Same is the case in promo and media. No “traditional” media agency won a gold in media. The winners in promotions too were no different.

The only two categories where specialists were able to hold forth were design and cyber. Even in design six of the 11 gold winners were mainline agencies.

Somehow the story of specialist agencies losing out is not restricted to Cannes alone. Faris Yakob, writing in Campaign UK laments the inability of true media agencies to win media awards at Clio where he was on the jury.

Faris has a point. And he feels the problem is not with the specialist agencies as much as it is with award shows and the entry process. He thinks that the entry is almost as important as the idea itself. “Since most of the campaigns are from other countries, as a judge you may have never encountered the work, you have no idea how it resonated locally, whether people loved it and talked about, or simply ignored it.”

The other thing, he feels that works against specialist agencies is that the entry is all you have to go on - a short form video advert for an agency. And traditional advertising agencies have quite a lot of experience making short form video adverts, whereas media agencies don’t.

Writing for Adweek Janet Evans Barker, one of the judges on the Cannes Direct Jury echoes what many people in specialist agencies think. “The reality is that some direct marketers and even some sales promo folks feel that Cannes is the bastion of general agencies. Some commented that the Direct Lions aren’t really about direct marketing at all, but about cool creative ideas masquerading as direct marketing in an attempt to win an award.” While she doesn’t fully agree with this view, she believes that while there is a hell of a lot of innovative direct work being done by (DM) agencies —that truly IS direct— it simply isn’t being submitted. Maybe there is a some truth in there. We searched for “Cannes” in Direct Magazine and there were some old bits but nothing about the 2008 festival and winners. DMA only does a little better.

So here is what we think. Specialists agencies have to think differently when it comes to winning at Cannes and Clio Awards. Explaining entries using a good video is critical if we have to top contenders in broad based award shows. Sure we can be happy with our Echos and Caples. But just as traditional agencies are crossing borders and walking away with accolades that are reserved for direct marketing, DM agencies need to learn the tricks of packaging their truly brilliant ideas as well as some of the mainline agencies do.

Like most people IBM’s Luis Suarez was drowning in email he would receive at work. Tired of his ritual of spending many hours of his mornings answering mails, Suarez decided to cut back. The fact that he is a social computing evangelist at IBM helped him make the switch easily. His one act, of cutting back on answering every mail he received reduced his mail traffic by 80% in the first week. He also started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. Read more from New York Times.

The Graves County High School in Kentucky has something extraordinary going on for them. The school’s student-run bank is aimed at educating students about banking and making a profit. Chris Sanders, a 17-year old techie, is the President who took upon the task of automating all accounting functions. This would mean not just daily deposit and withdrawal transactions, but also processing loan requests, loading all customer data, allowing balance enquiries, etc. Sanders designed a Microsoft Windows based software platform that allows all this and more account management needs. The bank is essentially a hands-on learning platform for the Banking and Finance students of the school, who are also its sole operators. Duties are handed over to new students with each passing year and revenue is generated not just from the school, but also from other miscellaneous avenues like yearbook sales. Wonder how far this would go once the bank has an
online portal. Read more about this interesting project here.

Kids in Japan will learn to save in a new RPG adventure with the soon-to-be launched game, Bankquest. Kids can shove money into the slot of this piggy bank tower, allowing the game to progress, and can then buy weapons and armor to slay dragons and beasts on behalf of their chosen protagonist. The game comes from Takara Tomy, the leading Japanese toy and entertainment company that has give Japan some of its favourite toys and games. This latest fascinating game is played through a small LCD window mounted in the side of the bank. Buttons underneath the screen let players control the game’s hero as he fights his way through a monster-infested tower. More than slaying and fighting, the game is mainly an incentive to save: equipment for the hero, necessary to defeat the tower’s denizens, can only be purchased by putting real money into the bank. The idea of taking a piggy bank further ahead in a gaming avatar is certainly making it a fun way of collecting money. Due to release in August, one will have to wait and see how this picks up among the Japanese kids. Read more here.

Information is getting democratic, personal and ubiquitous more than ever and business operators are digging into this trend. Visa is paying Facebook $2 million to advertise their new service, Visa Business Network, designed specially for Facebook users. Visa will give away $100 advertising credits to the first 20,000 US start-ups that download its service via Facebook. This online service is designed to help small firms run their businesses more efficiently. The company aims to tap into Facebook’s global audience of 80 million people. About 80,000 small businesses already have profiles on Facebook and thousands of Internet programmes have been developed specifically for the social networking site. But the majority of these applications are based on social activities, such as gaming, listening to music and picture-sharing, rather than traditional commercial activities. It will be interesting to see how this plan unfolds, even as small business operators find more ways of getting closer to their audiences. Many other companies like Visa may also follow suit to tap the power of social networking and that might come as a relief to sites such as Facebook, who would only welcome the extra income. More on this from Finextra.