SAN FRANCISCO — What happens when some of the leading lights in banking innovation gather for a two-day conclave? Lots of ideas — and lots of tweets.

I’m on the flight home from Bank Innovation 2013 and I’m overwhelmed with information. Even if you didn’t attend (because your internal budgeting people couldn’t see beyond the ends of their noses — you know who you are), you could get a good sense of the vitality and volume of information at Bank Innovation at the #bi13 hashtag. That I additionally attended a below-the-radar FinTech Meetup here after Bank Innovation 2013 ended only amplifies my sense of information overload.

Yet, I have a duty to you, o’ cherished reader, to share what I’ve learned. This is the first of what I expect will be a paced release of news, reflections and insights from the second annual Bank Innovation event. I’ll start with the six major themes.

1. Data Signals

Fair, Isaac & Co., now known as FICO, was founded in 1956 to calculate the propensity of borrowers to default. And underwriting analytics have evolved too little since then, argued Shawn Budde, founder of ZestFinance. Budde maintained that there is much “signal” data that can be used to gain far greater insights into a whole menu of financial services actions and needs. For example, Budde explained that ZestFinance, which offers subprime personal loans, has found that a prospective borrower who uses only lowercase letters in his online credit application has a greater propensity to default on a loan than someone who uses capitalization. (Capitalization indicates a certain “carefulness.”) This, explained Budde, is signal data. We expect to hear a lot more about this in the coming months. Signal data is big data for financial services. It is completely reasonable for banks to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and opportunities by better understanding the data they have in hand, rather than try to mine new data sets — although Budde said there are rich analytical opportunities in outside data.

2. Intelligent Personalization

There was an ardent cry at Bank Innovation 2013 for banks to better know, communicate and service the individual customer. As Bradley Leimer of Mechanics Bank put it (and I am paraphrasing here), consumers want banks to come full circle to what they were back in the days of old, when the banker knew the individual customer, and knew him exceedingly well. Obviously, this is a data-driven command. It was deemed at BI13 unacceptable for a teller, for example, to not know that the customer standing before her had received a large influx of money via RDC a few minutes earlier. We call that intelligent personalization, where a seamless IT system delivers seamless data across all communication platforms and across the entirety of a banking enterprise, no matter how large is that enterprise.

3. Outside Innovation

In what only can be described as a “the enemy is us” moment, several bankers acknowledged at Bank Innovation 2013 that they are largely looking for innovation outside their companies. Both Fifth Third Bancorp and Zions Bancorp, two of the more progressive super-regionals in the nation, are allocating more capital to investments in FinTech startups. That is not to say those banks, as examples, do not have internal skunk works; they do. It is just that for 53 and Zions, there is an understanding that startups are able to innovate unencumbered by legacy organizational and regulatory compliance constraints, and they are endeavoring to leverage that startup nimbleness with investments.

4. Internal Staging

USAA is in the midst of a multi-year project to remove the encumbrances to innovation. Other banks are doing this, too, including US Bank. The legacy technology and operational paradigms of banks — think batch-oriented data architecture — are being dismantled. Slowly. Very slowly. Bankers maintain that in many cases the first step to innovation is to prepare for innovation. For some banks, that will be a valuable first step in 2013.

5. Lowering Expectations

Historically, banks are so tied to ROI that product failures are viewed with great disdain. Products are launched to succeed, not fail. Well, that doesn’t really work with innovation. Innovation requires failure, lots of failure. As I mentioned above, after Bank Innovation 2013, I headed to a FinTech Meetup in a sterile conference room at KPMG’s local offices, and the lesson from Hitan Shah, founder of KISSMetrics, was one of acceptance of failure. Startups don’t always work, but that doesn’t necessarily jive with current bank culture. In innovation, maybe 5 of 20 ventures/products will hit. The C-suite at banks is looking for a hit ratio of 20:20, and that’s just unrealistic. Innovation bankers are working to dial down the expectation of senior management — to varying degrees of success, it should be added.

6. Ditch ‘Banking’ Altogether

Now this point got a bit ethereal and requires some explaining. To Jeff Stephens of Creative Brand Communications and Tribd, banking is just “money,” an exchange of value or even a socializing of value. Stephens argued that this required banks to think differently about what they do — an idea supported by Kristoffer Lawson, founder of Holvi, a Finnish banking startup. Stephens and Lawson argued that freeing banking from the strictures of historical precedent and notions is the first truism of innovation.

And, indeed, if you think about it, it is this kind of perspective — that maybe what banks should be doing is not even “banking” as we know it — which could be the greatest impetus for innovation of all. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is “right” or “wrong.” There is only the drive to innovate and serve the customer with the greatest depth and value possible. And that, in truth, is what Bank Innovation 2013 offered: a starting point.