Nationwide Updates It’s On-Line Banking
Nationwide has brought in a new on-line banking web site, which seems to go some of the way to meet some of my objections about lack of information.
As an example, I’d setup a single payment to pay a credit card bill for the 13th March. Until the start of this week, the money would have been debited from my account at midnight and marked in my account by an anonymous entry, just giving out how much I’d paid. But this morning, the money had gone from my account and the entry gave full details about the transaction.
So Nationwide seems to be getting closer to my ideal of a money transfer company, where I can collect all my incoming payments and organise all of my outgoings.
Would You Buy A Political Idea From This Man?
Gordon Brown is going to outline his ideas for better power sharing between London and Edinburgh. It’s all here on the BBC.
I doubt anybody will be listening!
I certainly won’t be, as he was one of the idiots, who saddled the UK with that useless bank, the Royal Bank of UK Taxpayers, for which we are all still paying.
It would have been so much cheaper to liquidate it and then pay everyone who lost out in taxpayers money. But that would have meant Labour losing all votes in Scotland!
Should Oyster Become A Bank?
This suggestion was put forward by the Social Market Foundation in a report yesterday.
Oyster is a trusted brand and it handles billions of transactions in a year, so expansion into a contactless bank, would probably be something that could work.
I also get better information from my Oyster card than I get from my debit or credit card. I can see my last journeys at most ticket machines in London, but can I find out the last five transactions on my debit card at a cash machine? I don’t think so!
So perhaps the other side of this suggestion, is should bank cards be more like Oyster?
Why Has This Art Not Been Sold?
My Internet trawl on the Royal Bank of UK Taxpayers has found this tasty morsel in the Scottish Daily Record web site. Here’s the first paragraph.
Fred the Shred’s stunning corporate art collection is still still under wraps at taxpayer-owned bank despite promises to make it more accessible to the public.
As selling this has no implications for the profitability of the rump of the bank or employment issues, it is a disgrace that it hasn’t been sold or at least displayed in public.
Why I’m Pleased Manchester City Lost
There’s an old saying about cheats never proper.
Read this article in Wikipedia about the UEFA Financial FairPlay Rules and especially this section which relates to Manchester City.
Until books are fully opened by all of these teams and probably published on the Internet, I will not give them an iota of my support or sympathy.
Barclays Loses Customer Data
Why is it the banks always seem to get things wrong? Or are they just accident prone?
This morning customer data from Barclays is reported to be on sale, here on the BBC.
I will not prejudge where the leak of information came from, but it will be interesting to see who did the dirty deed.
I suspect though we’ll see an increase in phishing scams tasrgeting Barclays customers.
Prospects For Scottish Banks
I have a trawl for the Royal Bank of Scotland in Goggle and two stories this morning make interesting reading.
Scotland Will Never Be Free as Long as It Has RBS is from Bloomberg and Analysis: Scottish banks plan quietly as independence debate gets louder is from the Chicago Tribune.
They should be read.
I don’t care which way Scotland votes, as it is their affair, but I won’t be following David Cameron’s advice to phone my Scottish friends and implore them to stay, Mainly because all of them seem to be in the Better Together camp.
One feeling I do have, is that the Scottish independence debate is the tail, that is wagging the donkey of the Royal Bank of Scotland. No bank is too big to fail, but because of the referendum in September, no English politician dare put the Royal Bank of Scotland and its employees out of its misery.
I can’t believe that if Barclays had got into the sort of trouble RBS did, then it wouldn’t have been liquidated.
RBS Mucks Up ISAs
My trawl for the Royal Bank of UK Taxpayers, has found this story from the Herald. Here’s the first paragraph.
Some NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) customers have found themselves short-changed in their monthly interest payments in the latest blunder to hit the banks.
It looks like a computer error.
It’s funny, but it seems quite a few of the stories critical of RBS, seem to be in the Herald. Didn’t it uised to be the Glasgow Herald?
Should We Jump On The Peer-to-Peer Bandwagon?
I wouldn’t tell anybody one way or other, but I would advise them to research the reputable peer-to-peer lenders, if they need to borrow money or save for the future.
This article from Julian Knight was published yesterday in the Independent.In the opening paragraph he speculates that you might be able to fund peer-to-peer lending from an ISA.
As he says, it might only be kite flying, but if it is, it is a kite armed with some serious ordnance destined for the banks.
You may dismiss peer-to-peer lending as something for nerds, accountants or gamblers, but even if you do, read the article.
If you decide to act on it, make sure you think before you leap.
What Can The Banks Do For Us?
After writing the previous post about Mark Carney’s thoughts on the pound and Scottish independence, I got to thinking about the nature of different currencies and how I feel about them.
On my travels to Budapest, Stockholm, Palermo and Bilbao, I’ve used Hungarian forint, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian krone and Swiss francs in addition to euro and pounds. Train journeys across Europe could be a nightmare, as like the trip back from Stockholm, each country could be a different currency and you end up with enough change to tear holes in all your pockets, but impossible to understand.
The personal preference, that I like to use cash makes it worse in a non-euro and non-pound country, like Hungary, where I don’t have any natural feel for notes and coins.
I just think that the banks are making it easy for us to handle all these currencies, but some have made a start.
I have a credit card from Nationwide, that just converts the transaction into pounds on my statement and doesn’t charge me any commission, when I use it abroad.
As a customer I like that and I’ve heard one savings expert recommend this credit card for just this reason.
So shouldn’t all credit cards be like this?
But i used to be a world-class computer programmer. Probably to say I used to be is totally wrong, as my mind is still reasonably sharp and it certainly knows what computers can do.
So why when I use my credit card in say Ruritania and I pay for a delicious gluten-free meal with my credit card, does the terminal not show me the cost in both Ruritanian wotsits and English pounds? If I was say a Frenchman and my bank account was in euros, then I would want euros instead of pounds.
All it needs is a bit of clever software.
Come on you bankers!
The Anonymous Widower 