Innovations and snails

According to Fast Company, only one of the Top 10 financial websites of the world comes from a traditional bank.  That bank is Itaú Unibancoe in Brazil.  Well done Itaú Unibancoe ... what happened to the rest of you?

Oh yes, banks don't innovate.  I forgot.

Mind you, plenty of innovation from outside banks and my favourite upstart of the year has to be BPAY in Australia.

What's BPAY?

It's a 12-year old newbie on the payments block that has, since its launch in November 1997, become the
most popular bill payment service in Australia.

Over 170 Australian financial
institutions covering around 90% of the consumer banking market, belong to the scheme.  This has resulted in 18 million bills worth
AUS$11 billion being paid using BPAY every month, and more than 84% of these are paid
over the internet.

That's the nature of innovations like BPAY and PayPal, they just nibble away at the fringes of banking and gradually become processors with clout before you know it.

So why are BPAY in my good books?

Because they've launched a really fun website called: the World's Biggest, Most Awesome Waste of Time.

We think mindlessly flicking through TV channels at 2am, or spending the day Facebook stalking, is a pretty average way to waste your time.  Instead, pay your bills quickly and easily online with BPAY and, with the extra time you save, you could go big with your time wasting.  In fact so big, and so awesome, that you could call it the world's biggest, most awesome, waste of time.

BPAY have illustrated this with a great video of Snail Art, and this video is why they're my favourite upstart of the year so far:

They're also running this as a competition:

We're pretty keen to find out what your idea of awesome time wasting would be, so we've decided to turn it into a competition.

First prize will be getting your idea filmed by a professional production crew.

I wonder if the Baaa-Studs will enter:

 

Hattip to Banking Review