Now Lloyds And The Co-op Drop Us In It
Captain Mainwaring would not have been amused, as yesterday Lloyds and the Co-op seem to have had system errors, or as I prefer to call them programming bugs, in their computers. It’s here on the BBC.
It may have been unrelated but one of my credit cards wouldn’t work on-line yesterday and they asked me to phone them. They said they were just rebooting the computers, and it should be OK in a couple of hours. Do we reboot computers, as we generally give them a good kicking first?
How Zopa Beats The Stock Market
This article was trawled out of the Internet by Google. It’s well worth a detailed read.
The Downside of PFI
I found this little story tucked away on the Internet. In 1998, London Underground entered into a PFI contract with a consortium called Powerlink to provide power to the system. Although, they have no issues with the consortium, London Underground have decided to exercise a break clause, that should save them £220m over the thirty year life of the contract.
Sounds like good and sensible business to me, unless you’re a member of the consortium.
Supposedly, New Buses for London cost about £330,000 each. If you divide this into £220m, you get approximately 667 buses.
Didn’t Transport for London just buy 600 New Buses for London?
It makes you think!
Bank Transfer Problems
Last week, I wanted to transfer sixty thousand from the sale of my house in Suffolk, from my bank account to a respected stockbrokers, who were going to invest the money for me in a safe investment until I need it to perhaps do my new house up.
I thought it would be best to transfer ten grand to see that the system worked. It didn’t, so it was returned! Apparently, my bank tried to send it through Faster Payments and the bank at the other end couldn’t accept that sum immediately and returned it. Speaking to my stockbroker, he said this happened a lot. Is this down to money laundering regulations, which question all large transfers?
It turned out the maximum sum, that I could transfer must be less than ten thousand.
So I transferred £9921.00, by following my rules, as it was the twenty-first when I did it. It went through without trouble.
Then I transferred £9921.01, £9921.02, £9921.03, £9921.04, £9921.05 and £473.85, to complete the sixty thousand.
What a farce!
What got me, when I tried to transfer the £60,000 in the first place, was that my on-line banking site, stopped me, but didn’t tell me how I was to do it. I suppose, that I had to phone up or go into a branch. But then I bank on-line!
I suppose they want me to keep the money in my Current Account or so-called Saving Account, which pays a similar interest to a mattress!
No wonder everybody gets annoyed with bankers! But in this case, I assume that it’s the money laundering regulations, which are very easy to circumvent if you’re a drug dealer, but just make it difficult for the rest of us!
London Uses The Train Model For 600 New Buses for London
London has just ordered 600 New Buses for London from Wrightbus, according to this article on the BBC website.
Boris’s political opponents say he is wrong, but they would anyway, wouldn’t they?
On the other hand, what Transport for London (TfL) are using is exactly the same purchase model, as that used for trains in this country.
The trains are ordered by the Department of Transport, owned by leasing companies or ROSCOs and then hired by the train companies like Virgin. In many cases, the maintenance is arranged by the manufacturer or ROSCO and they guarantee to provide so many trains each day.
When applied to London’s buses, this must give similar advantages.
- Although, TfL are buying 600 buses, I suspect that this package includes maintenance and guarantees a specific number of operational buses. In fact, on the 38 route, there are nine in service, but usually one is kept as a spare, in case of failure.
- Are TfL selling the leases on to a third party? How many of those, who are against the deal, have never bought something on hire purchase or a lease?
- The buses can be used, where and when they are needed. Most routes need about 20-30 buses, so batches of the New Buses can be moved around, according to need. For instance, the passenger pattern may be very different according to the seasons, so buses might run on one route in summer and another in the winter.
- These buses will change as time goes on and owning them outright, gives TfL the opportunity to update the older ones to the new specification.
- I think too, that the single ownership, should mean that the buses will have a longer service lifetime, just like the old Routemasters and the Inter City 125 trains.
- It will also give TfL time to do a full analysis of bus design, operation patterns and costs.
So all things being well, I think this could be a good decision, that saves money in the long term.
Bank Transfer Traceability
One thing that annoys me about on-line banking, is that when you pay a bill like a credit card, you often can’t trace it at both ends, as often the reference doesn’t appear for some days. So now, I usually pay them making sure the last two digits are the day of the month. That way it becomes obvious, if the transfer has been made and what it was.
It really all comes down to the fact that banks do not provide full information on their statements. And when they’ve not got it, they don’t even give you a clue!
I would be ashamed if I’d designed such a poor system.
Did The Government Dither Over Northern Rock?
Sir Nicholas Macpherson was the senior civil servant in the Treasury, when Northern Rock ran into difficulties. He has just appeared before the Treasury Select Committee and there is a report here. This is the first paragraph.
The Treasury’s most senior civil servant has told MPs the government should have been quicker to nationalise Northern Rock following its collapse.
It doesn’t appear to me, that the government appeared to act quickly at all.
Perhaps, Gordon Brown was just being too prudent!
On the other hand, I’ve done financial modelling with loan companies and know that if you decide to run them down collecting all the payments aggressively, you can often retrieve a bad situation.
So perhaps, they were hoping Northern Rock would all come good! It didn’t!
Remember though, the bank did employ a lot of people in Labour’s heartland. So liquidation would have been a bad option for NuLabor.
Zopa Simplifies The Markets
Zopa has today announced that instead of having five markets; A*, A, B, C and Youth, this will soon be simplified to just three, with C and Y being discarded.
Effectively this will bring it in line with what I do, as I don’t invest in the Youth market and although I’ve recently added the C market to my offer, I haven’t lent anything there yet. All market rates of late have been very stable, so my control engineering theory says hat everything should be in balance.
I think they are right to do this.
- They would now be appearing to be making a much better offer to younger borrowers with a good credit rating.
- The simplified structure makes it easier to decide your lending strategy.
- It also makes it less important to get it right on the optimum.
We shall see if they are right and business and returns improve.
Is It Worth Investing In Zopa’s C Market?
Zopa’s C market pays better than the ones that I invest in now. At present, I get 6.3% in A*, 6.7% in A and 7.6 in B. Switching on C has given me 8.9% in that market.
I’m going to switch it on for a month or so, and see if my bad debt gets worse. I didn’t always have the B market switched on and so far, I haven’t had a write-off in that market. I enabled it on the 17th December 2010.
The aim is to see if the extra interest received is worth the extra defaults.
Suppose I had £1,000 invested in the C market, which could be paying upwards of 1.3% better than B. This would give me an extra thirteen pounds a year.
After about 12 hours, I’ve got one contract pending in the C market.
Current Account Fraud Rises
The Independent is reporting that current account fraud is rising.
I suppose this will only afect the man on the Dalston Omnibus, if the banks don’t make sure they check applications correctly.
