Dutch Financial Advice Coming to SecondLife

According to 'Dutch bank ABN sets up branch in Second Life', ABN AMRO will be coming into SecondLife:

... ABN AMRO, the Netherlands biggest bank, said it will create a virtual bank resembling ABN's real-life outlets, offering financial advice.

Although Second Life has a virtual economy, where users use Linden dollars to buy and sell virtual goods and real estate, ABN said it won't be offering banking services at first. An ABN spokeswoman said that such services may be available in the future...

..."Communicating with customers via the Internet can become more personal and more direct," Wietze Reehoorn, a member of ABN's executive board, said in a statement. "Competition between Dutch banks will be determined to a significant degree by finding the best way to establish personal contact with customers...

The offering of financial advice within SecondLife by professionals sounds good to me - and it's certainly going to get ABN AMRO some exposure, and competing for the Dutch market by getting exposure in a de facto global market is an interesting direction to take. In 2005, ABN AMRO did some major IT outsourcing which involved several vendors competing with each other, deviating from the usual exclusivity arrangements prevalent in most outsourcing contracts.

Maybe this is a sign that ABN AMRO gets globalization and the idea of remaining competitive in a Global Market by leveraging whatever they can. If they offered financial services within SecondLife in the future - that might be an interesting thing as well... Working in an unregulated system as most present SecondLife banks do now has distinct advantages.

Would the SL banks and the RL banks that enter SL co-exist peacefully? I'm not sure. Banks have a way of eating each other.