BarCamp Dublin

I've proposed a talk at BarCamp Dublin titled 'Selling Web2.0 to Irish Financial Institutions'

Obviously BarCamp is very technology focused and most of the audience is well versed in blogs, rss, atom, social networks etc...

What I wanted to highlight is the huge disconnect between the technology talk and the movers and shakers of Irish business. These are the people that hold the purse strings and need to be convinced. How do I know? well for the last couple of months I've been pitching the Cengal service to then. What I'd like to highlight is some of the things that I've picked up should others find themselves in the same position.

To give more context about the company Cengal is building an online channel for financial companies.

For consumers we're solving the problem of how much of a pain it is to buy your financial products direct and still be able to compare prices. You have to enter your details on about 10 different sites to get market coverage, and you have to repeat it every year. We're building a solution where the consumer enters it once, and providers registered through the service can quote for their business - a bit like eBay in reverse.

The advantages for consumers are straightforward. You enter your request once, and you get market coverage. Being technology focused there's plenty of other additional benefits which I won't go into here.

The advantages for providers are we're building an Internet channel for them for zero capital cost. We get an introductory fee for a closed sale. It costs a lot of money to build, maintain and market an online service and in most cases these skills have to be bought in at great expense - very few online services for a single provider are returning on their cost and investment. Up until now that was the only option, now they have another.