Smart Cities vs Banks?

Would you agree if your banking-data was disclosed to governments?

I’m talking about the governments knowing almost everything about your payments: where you buy, how much you buy, how you plan, etc, etc…

Nevertheless, what is important to stress now is that for cities to become smart, their governments need to act, to reform, to re-create: innovating. And for that, a huge investment is needed. Although it may seem simple, this huge investment is really complicated to get, giving the tough conditions we live in, especially in Europe with the recession still taking place, and most of the countries not opening their pockets to this kind of initiatives. Not only is difficult to get the money, but even if they get it, how to manage? How governments can manage those investments for an innovative interconnected city? Probably they can’t. At least alone.

Now we call to the game Mr. Private Party.

Banks are institutions with fairly big capital, and fairly private, making constant improvements on their IT structures:

1 — They need to constantly adapt to the fast-paced digital world in order to ensure not only safety to its clients but also ease and less-troublesome ways of transact money.

2 — The increase of data in their storage systems and the processing techniques needed make sure they continue investing in IT.

What about a synergy then?

Yeah, what about?

If banks can give this knowledge to governments, upon certain restrictions of course, because no one likes to give out their bread and butter.

Nonetheless, the synergy between them would make things easier: on one side we would have the knowledge, the investment, the structure, and on the other side we have the connection with costumers, the citizens of a given city and the need of connection to the government departments and public facilities.

Both institutions would benefit, since they get more in contact with their customers and the the latter will benefit as well since it will have better services, better infrastructures, better communication, better life quality, without putting more effort: it’s a win win situation.