Big financial firms, which so far were ignoring the web 2.0 technology and concept are finally realizing that it’s not something that they can ignore for long.

We already see a few things already happening in this direction.  Some banks/financial institutions are using it for building relations with prospective clients and to get into a dialogue with young adults using applications on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

For example, TD canada has an application called “Split It” on Facebook that room-mates can use to split their expenses. This is how the application looks like. As you can see it has a link on top called “TD Canada trust group” that points to TD’s group page on Facebook containing advertisements, bank information and discussion board.

The idea of having the application is to establish engagement with the users, not necessarily to push a product or to make money out of it. They are using it as a tool to build relationship with younger crowd on Facebook who can be potential customers with the bank.

Similarly Wells Fargo (California) has created an application on MySpace and a blog site.

Other firms like ETrade offer its customers the ability to create mashups to let them do analysis of their investment opportunities. Citibank is leveraging JackBe (enterprise mashups platform) to build/deploy some of its applications.

The financial firms are also starting to realize that Web 2.0 technology (and more importantly the concept) gives them the ability to more efficiently generate, self-publish and find information and also the ability to share expertise in a way that’s much easier and cheaper than earlier knowledge management attempts.

In fact, a recent research report from Gartner predicts that “by 2012, 75 percent of banks will use Web 2.0 technologies in retail delivery, and social networking technologies will drive lucrative customer relationships”. We already see some trends in that direction.

It would be very interesting to see how many firms (whether financial or not) have started incorporating Web 2.0 concepts in their environments. Have you come across (or working on) any inititative that indicate that your company may be willing to embrace these new concepts anytime soon?