I got back late last night from the NACHA Payments conference in Orlando. It was a good event, although not surprisingly, it was apparent that attendance was down. Sessions seemed to be well attended, although exhibit hall traffic was light (and much smaller this year to boot). I spent most of my time at the conference in meetings with our clients - a mix of banks and software vendors. Most of my meetings centered around online banking and payments, particularly for small businesses and large corporates. A few noticeable trends emerged:
- Web 2.0 is finally arriving to the business online banking space. Almost all the vendors I met with either talked about or showed me fresh GUIs with better navigation and layout. This is long overdue. A couple of the vendors have been working on this for a little while, and their advances made it into my upcoming online cash management vendor evaluation report (the report is complete. It's now time for it to be edited and for the vendors to review their profiles prior to publication). Bank of America had an interesting but basic presentation on next generation Web 2.0 cash management solutions. I was quoted in the presentation, and it's nice to see a bank thinking about the next generation of solutions.
- Dashboards are a key component of next generation online banking solutions. This was definitely the buzzword. I discussed this at length in my report, Web 2.0: A Quantum Leap for Wholesale Banking .
- Banks still don't get the importance of PFM for small business. I seemed to be the one asking the questions about this. I would have liked to see greater emphasis on PFM, particularly with the Web 2.0 demos and discussions.
