Danish Bank to Offer Real-World Services in SL
I missed this on Friday, but it makes a nice fulfillment of something I was pondeirng a couple of weeks ago: what if a bank started offering real-world financial services through the virtual world of Second Life? Reuters’ Adam Pasick has the news that just such a thing is coming: “Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies,” he writes. It’s still in an early stage, but it sounds like Saxo will allow people to access their real-world trading accounts from within Second Life, and perhaps eventually give them the option to receive a portion of trading profits in Linden dollars. Saxo sounds interested in creating a forex market for Lindens as well, though it won’t do so at the moment because of serious doubts about how the L$ is managed. Having real-world financial institutions get into the services market, though, should help push the Linden-dollar economy forward. This will be an interesting one to watch.
Feeds
Sounds interesting. I only wonder if today one is able to set up a secure environment from SL to RL to do the login into the RL system. Any thoughts on that?
Next to that, there is obviously that discussion of what type of activity you fundamentally want to do in 3d and what in 2d (did I read about that Amazon discussion here?). However, being in 3d (SL) I imagine going back to 2d within SL whenever it is required in the future. Next to that I think that looking in 3d to your financials could be interesting in terms of visualisation.
Yust my two cents…
I know that ABN AMRO and ING are working on exactly this, AVASTAR reported on ING’s ATM service and financial products being developed for Second Life awhile ago.
I wonder if it will go as far as Entropia Universe, where you can get yourself a real, honest-to-goodness ATM card that allows you to withdraw Entropia currency as RL currency at over a million ATMs worldwide.
http://www.entropiauniverse.com/en/rich/5676.html
Now that’s what I call integrating Real and Virtual worlds!
Oh… and watch out for BNP PARIBAS entering SL in the not-too-distant future. You read it here first, remember.
Anyone have any experience with ASxo Forex Accounts?