How about starting a bank?

Matt Mullenweg is one of the founders of WordPress, the software platform that powers this blog — and many others.

But if he wasn’t working on WordPress all the time, what would he be doing? He says, maybe he’d start a bank:

The name of my bank would be something supremely boring, like SafeBank. The idea behind it is that bad behaviour in the banking world has been largely inevitable because their compensation structures incented people to do overly risky things. SafeBank would maintain a reserve level 2-3x higher than Fed requirements and any other bank. SafeBank would have no bonuses. Critics would say this would make it impossible to attract top-shelf talent. Every time the bank gets attacked we’d turn it into an advertising opportunity to emphasize why we’re different. “We can’t attract top-shelf talent? We take your money and put it in a vault. We don’t need the million-dollar bonus geniuses on Wall Street to do that. SafeBank. Bank, safe.”

Drawing on the ethos of open-source and the software startup industry, Mullenweg says that he would grow his bank slowly and organically, but expects it would reach a tipping point where it would start to put pressure on the big banks to reign in their worst practices.

The bank would make money through data-mining, though even he expresses some discomfort from the privacy implications of some of that. Why couldn’t it just lend money at fair rates, the same way banks used to?

Aside from the fact that “SafeBank” wouldn’t have any bricks-and-mortar outlets, being an online-only entity, it strikes me as pretty similar in ethics to the way banks used to be.

Sounds like an interesting idea — I wonder if anyone will run with it. If you’re interested in it at all, go read the rest of his post — he’s got it seriously thought-out.