Here’s a press release from the presentation I gave at the Sibos conference, held this week in Vienna, Austria:

VIENNA, Austria, Sept 17, 2008 PRNewswire via COMTEX — The fastest way to restore confidence to America’s bludgeoned financial services industry is through unprecedented transparency amongst all players, says Don Tapscott, influential business strategist with nGenera Corporation and co-author of the best-selling business book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.”

“Rebuilding trust takes total transparency, which is completely feasible and affordable in a digitized world. As financial instruments became more complex they became more opaque, which has proved disastrous. We need lots of the sunlight that smart digital tools could offer.”

Tapscott is a keynote speaker this week at the Sibos 2008 conference in Vienna, Austria. With 7,000 attendees, the conference is the global financial services industry’s premier event.

“We can’t afford the almost two decades that it took for Japan to recover from its 1990 financial implosion. The US industry requires fresh capital and updated regulations, but that’s not enough to reboot the system,” says Tapscott. “Investors have been burnt badly, and some won’t fully trust Wall Street for many years, possibly a generation.

“Bankers and business leaders should be looking to collaborate around a private sector solution to the chronic problems undermining the financial services marketplace. They need to rethink many assumptions of the basic modus operandi of the financial services marketplace.

“For example, investors should be able to ‘fly over’ and ‘drill down’ into a Collateralized Debt Obligation’s underlying assets. With full data, they could readily graph the payment history, and correlate information such as employment histories, recent appreciation (or depreciation), location, neighborhood pricings, delinquency patterns, and recent neighborhood offer and sales activities. Now that AAA ratings have proved worthless, currently investors don’t have a glimmer of what they are being asked to buy. And they won’t start buying until they fully understand what they are purchasing and know that the price is fair.

“Inevitably, once the deep issues underlying this credit crisis are exposed, there will be calls for more stringent regulation — just as in the 1930s the SEC was created, and ‘unit trusts’ (now mutual funds) were forced to disclose their holdings. In the age of Wikinomics — or true mass collaboration as an economic force — we don’t need another round of onerous Sarbanes-Oxley style provisions. Rather, new avenues for transparent collaboration between market participants would be far more robust than hiring more oversight bureaucrats. For over a century, 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.”

Tapscott is Chair of the innovation network arm of nGenera Corporation, an Austin, TX-based technology company serving a marquee list of Global 2000 customers. nGenera Corporation provides a suite of subscription-based offerings to enable the Next Generation Enterprise. Powered by software and people, nGenera gives organizations sustainable, breakthrough capabilities in leadership performance, talent management and development, and customer experience.

The annual Sibos conference is the only global event that covers all sectors of the financial community, and attracts the industry’s leading figures and companies. Attendees range from established financial institutions to application and middleware vendors, system integrators, central clearing systems and consultants. Leading experts in their field come to debate and share their knowledge about new technologies, processes, requirements, alliances, efficiency and security.