The Wesabe blog

In England a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) customer sends debt collectors to force bank to repay unlawfully collected fees (Story).  So there are a few elements of this that are interesting: 1) fees = an adversarial relationship between bank and customers, 2) at some point consumers (voters) will reach a boiling point, and 3) my bet is that in the search for profits banks will push to that boiling point.

The real question is when consumers stop feeling guilty for what is often an administrative error and start getting angry at being exploited.  Ramit Sethi has a post on the topic that is illustrative of common sense – read the first comment in response to Ramit’s ideas.

I first read about Genarlow Wilson on Mark Cuban’s blog.  If you haven’t heard of Genarlow, he is a 20-year-old former honor student who is two years into a 10-year prison sentence in Georgia for a consensual sex act with another teen.   You can read the specifics here NY Times & ESPN, but suffice it to say, this is clearly a miscarriage of justice.

I signed the petition and thought of the Tito Puente song “El Pico” better known as “Never go back to Georgia.”   A couple of days later, Jason Calacanis mentioned the story in his blog and encouraged other bloggers to speak up – which I thought was a damn good idea.  I’d like to encourage anyone else with a blog who reads this (and feels inclined) to do the same thing.

When I was a kid we used to play dogpile, where we would all jump on top of some poor kid at the bottom – good times.  I like it when bloggers all blogpile on corrupt, unjust and unacceptable behavior.  Shining a light on people in power and making them accountable for their decisions embodies everything I love about being a part of the Internet community.

I’m a fan of the guys at Trabian (OpenSourceCU). I like their sites, ethos, goals…everything. On January 31^st they launched “Give With Us,” and completely knocked my socks off. Jim Bruene posted an excellent review here.

Trey posted a response to Jim’s review today – particularly responding to some of the challenges of making “Give With Us” a success, but I would have liked him to emphasize a little bit more on the opportunities for credit unions. Challenge: it only works if people at the credit union commit to it – deep down inside commit and make it part of how they understand their job and success at their job. I think that is asking a lot, but I also believe it offers a game changing shift: “Give With Us” is a way for credit unions to put themselves in the center of their member’s emotional and financial life. Seriously.

I’ll use myself as an example – I have wanted to volunteer for years. I’m really interested in the process of transitioning out of university and into professional life – especially for low income students who don’t have white collar family members to help. People’s desire to give back, engage or contribute to the community is persistent. The ability for credit unions to help realize those powerful emotions is a real opportunity. It connects the dots between the person, credit union and the community.

One of the features that I especially like about the product is the ability to create badges that you can put on other sites (for donations or information). I think it is very cool that they are using Web 2.0 tools for credit unions, and frankly, it is this process that will move Web 2.0 towards the mainstream.

Congratulations to the guys at Trabian for building such a cool product!