The Dutch bank ABN AMRO will use in the Netherlands Active Worlds for internal communication, collaboration and e-learning purposes. I wrote a story about this in T-zine, a technology blog of my newspaper, De Tijd. That text is in Dutch, so I will post here a version in English.
I learned about the choice for Active Worlds during a presentation about Banking in Second Life by Daan Josephus Jitta, Senior Vice President Direct Channels and Innovation of ABN AMRO Netherlands. He was speaking for members of the banking community in Antwerp (Belgium).
Active Worlds (Newburyport, MA) offers solutions for the creation of 3-D virtual environments. Users can create their own environments. ABN AMRO bought 250 licenses.
Josephus Jitta said that the environments make it possible to have meetings with employees all over the Netherlands, using tools such as video, slides and whiteboards.
The part of ABN AMRO for which Josephus Jitta works has been bought by the Belgian/Dutch financial services group Fortis. The transition makes communication even more important.
Second Life
In December 2006 ABN AMRO was the first European bank to establish itself in Second Life. “We wanted to learn about the use of this potentially disruptive technology”, Josephus Jitta told the audience. However, Second Life is not considered to be a tremendous success in the Netherlands. Josephus Jitta says there are about 20.000 Dutch users and of those only a limited part is really active.
ABN AMRO hoped initially to actually sell products and to give financial advice. Legal and security issues prevented this. The bank did organize a bi-weekly informative meeting about the financial markets. Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, did not help ABN AMRO to solve key issues like the use of data encryption.
Active Worlds runs on computers which are installed at ABN AMRO, behind the firewalls of the company. Jitta also told me that Active Worlds makes it possible for thousands of people to attend a meeting, contrary to Second Life, where only about 60 tot 80 people can meet at the same place (unless one uses a structure on four adjoining sims for instance, or screens which are positioned elsewhere inworld).
ABN AMRO does not exclude that Active Worlds later on will also be used for external communications and transactions.
ABN AMRO underlines it stays in Second Life. The number of islands will be reduced from 25 to about 6 or 8. Unfortunately for ABN AMRO, Linden Lab just dropped the prices. The financial markets meetings will be less frequent.
As we discussed in a previous post, IBM will host private regions of Second Life on its own computers behind the coporate firewall. I guess that should solve security issues. However, it seems that this development comes too late to convince corporations such as ABN AMRO, even though people in those corporations are firm believers in virtual worlds.
I will post later on about this belief of ABN AMRO in new media and more in particular in virtual worlds.
Roland Legrand