Don Tapscott, the management guru and co-author of Wikinomics, told 7,000 bankers at the Swift International Banking Operations Seminar (Sibos) in Vienna that the solution to the financial turmoil was for the industry to adopt a Wiki approach. “Sure, we need an infusion of fresh capital into the industry and we need some fresh new regulations, but they may be insufficient. What I argued to the bankers is that the industry itself needs to change to solve these problems,” he told The Times. That involves embracing the four principles of Wikinomics:

1 Be transparent and open: “Investors should have full access to information and data on collateralised debt obligations and underlying assets . . . Basically, now that AAA ratings are pretty much worthless, investors have no idea really of what they are being asked to buy, and they won’t start buying until they fully understand what it is they are purchasing and they know that the price is fair,” he said.

“We’ve understood the value of transparency in pricing for market goods. As securities become more complex, we can use new digital tools to bring that same market approach [transparency and collaborative evaluation] to underlying information as well.”

2 Share intellectual property: “A lot of our risk-management models are viewed as proprietary sources of competitive advantage. They [risk managers] hoard all this information. They don’t share best practices. Banks and financial institutions should get together and share a lot of this information,” Mr Tapscott said.

“For something like 4 per cent of mortgages in the United States the lender knew that the borrower wouldn’t even make the first payment but they were passing it [the risk] off on to somebody else, so they didn’t care. So there was no collaborative framework, there was no cooperation.”

3 Act globally. Mr Tapscott said that regulation should be agreed globally, not locally. “If Lehman is going under in the United States, you can bet eventually it is going to ripple through the UK and France [and beyond] . . . This is a global problem and we need to have global solutions.”

4 Collaborate with peers. “The big financial institutions need to get together and find an industry-wide solution to this problem,” he told the bankers. “The CEO of Barclays should call upon his peers to come together to form a global think-tank of all financial services institutions and figure out how to apply these four principles to fundamentally reinvent the modus operandi of the financial services companies and in doing so to restructure and reform the industry.”

Those bankers who had not fled the seminar to deal with the fallout from the crisis rapturously applauded Mr Tapscott’s advice.

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