Noting the news last night it's not a great time to be associated with banking and as such the professional community will seek solace amongst its members.

So, during this period of kinship and support perhaps some managers will study how the renewed trust in peers and colleagues can be put to good use.

Transparency creates trust, trust facilitates transactions - positive transactions or interactions have a significant effect on a company and this short video here will explain why allowing people to come together with social technologies and self-organise into communities of practices is having a significant productivity boost across the bottom line at Caterpillar - a successful business, so one should respect that and see what can be learnt.

It seems obvious to allow time for your employees to connect with their peers across these networks to collaboratively problem solve - though you have to give them the trust to help you innovate and share the reward for it to work.

It's not the first time this drum has been beaten, JP Rangaswami was seen as perhaps too forward-looking when he introduced wiki technology earlier this decade though I'm sure you'll find a wiki in every bank now :-)

Though, why not take this further still.  Can banks figure out how to modernise their client services - can they find a way to engage in more transparent dialogue rather than branch-focused workshops with a few customers and expensive budgets that push the brand in other ways?

It would be very easy to take a leaf out of the IT service desk approach and evolve the current online banking tools by running a proper Q&A, forum and knowledge base for staff and customers to use and evolve together though there's not much to banking, is there?

Introducing proactive support could be a very useful way to improve customer retention, satisfaction and brand perception.  Most customers right now are worried sick about the future - what are you telling them to help them make the best judgement possible, more so - what do you know that could help them make the 'right' decisions?  Just how informed are you on prices and pricing, I'd say give nthe right mindset you know plenty and now is the time to monetise that.

Improving the utility of your online service is key - it's not hard to see how useful it might be to pick a date range and query the sum of transactions according to a filter yet banks are still far behing the curve in terms of providing dynamic statement tooling especially when rich internet applications make this effortless today.

I still think an open API for retail would be a nice revolution in how banks service their customers however I must confess I heard little interest from the community thus far so have made a note not to mention it in the near future unless someone offers me a large sum of money ;-)