A Use for a Cheque
I got a cheque today to settle my problem with National Express East Anglia. I’m not a lover of cheques, but this must be one use for them, as they didn’t have my bank details and probably the credit card details weren’t stored either, as it was a transaction in a station.
Incidentally john Lewis give out gift vouchers for small payments and another rail company gave me compensation for a late train in a Rail Travel Voucher. For me neither is a problem, as I go to Waitrose a couple of times a week and I suspect that the Rail Voucher will be used on a trip to see Ipswich Town.
I wonder how long before Universal Gift Vouchers or something similar become commonplace. These would be bar coded and possibly issued to a particular person, very much like the vouchers I buy for The Times. I think some companies already use M & S vouchers in this way.
When I paid the cheque into my account at a branch of Nationwide in Upper Street, the counter was empty, and I joked with the cashier about writing few cheques these days. He agreed that he didn’t either and judging by his expression, he’d done little business that day. Admittedly, it was lunchtime, but all this seems to say that counter service will soon be gone.
We just need to replace the cheque.
Halifucked Or Spam From the Halifax
Over the last couple of days, I have received several spam e-mail from a marketing company, working on behalf of the Halifax. They all offered me a new credit card, which is like offering someone like Andy Murray a new tennis racket, as the ones I’ve got, are perfectly adequate for my modest needs.
So not only do we have bail out this wunch of bankers, but we have to endure their spam in our inboxes. Interestingly, it very much looks genuine and some of it has come to e-mail addresses, I’ve not used in at least ten years. I’ve kept them as spam traps for tossers like these and they’ve worked well.
Interestingly, the Halifax web site appears to have no means of contacting the bank on it, that is obvious to an irate non-customer.
Santander Bring Their Call Centres Back To The UK
This story about Santander seems to be part of a trend, with more and more call centres returning to the UK. What surprises me is that Santander supposedly has 25,000,000 account holders in the UK and it is creating only hundreds and not thousands of jobs by moving the call centres back.
So just how often do we phone our banks? I have phoned my bank twice in the several years I’ve been with them and I’ve e-mailed once about a piece of trivia. I also have phoned a credit card company once, as the card was damaged and I needed a new one.
So judging by the times I’ve called them, I’m fairly typical.
So Santander moving their call centres back to the UK, may be a cynical marketing ploy to try to improve their bad customer service image. But it could really be just a way to reduce their call centre to the size required.
As with the Lloyds redundancies, it will be interesting to see what employee/turnover ratios for banks look like in a few years time.
My guess is that they’ll make huge profits with only a few employees. But on the other hand, people will be very satisfied with customer support, although they’ll probably still complain about getting loans. But then the sensible will borrow their money elsewhere.
“Banking Will Be The Mining Industry of the Nineties”
My old friend and bank manager, David, said that quote about 1995 or so. At the time he had just been promoted to Business Banking Director of Lloyds Bank. One day, I’ll tell everybody about the rest of that lunch, but I suspect that some of the guilty are still involved in banking.
What I would say, and I know others will agree, although one has now joined David as one of the Devil’s right hand men, is that there never ever was another bank manager who was as good as David, when it came to guiding and nurturing companies from inception to stardom. In some ways though, he was a rogue. But he was always a rogue on the side of the angels.
He had seen banks at all levels and knew that they were massively overstaffed and that the only way in his view they could survive and prosper was by cutting out the deadwood. He told me that what had happened to the miners would happen again to workers in the banking industry.
And then yesterday, Lloyds announced a lot of job losses.
So David was eventually right, but he had seen the writing on the wall all those years ago.
Perhaps Not The Cheapest Way To Borrow Money!
I saw this advert on the Underground today.
An Advert for QuickQuid on the Tube
Note the interest rate of 1734% APR!
Farewell Cheque Guarantee Cards
I moved my account to Nationwide, when Barclays took over the Woolwich some years ago. I never ever used the cheque guarantee card that I received.
So I don’t think I’ll miss the fact that they’ve been abolished.
Will anyone?
Zopa Abandons Listings
Basically, Zopa had two different forms of lending; markets and listings.
Markets work by lenders getting together to fund loans to borrowers. All is done automatically by the computers and risk assessors in the middle.
Listings are best defined like this.
In a nutshell, they work just like an online auction, except that the ‘price’ comes down instead of going up.
Once a listing becomes 100% funded, you’ll see that the overall interest rate will begin to fall as lenders compete with each other to be included in the loan.
I never used them. And as they weren’t as popular as markets and were quite expensive to administer, Zopa have now dropped them.
Would Any Sane Person Buy Into the Greek Privatisation?
Let’s say you are the CEO of a utility company, which has a good record of managing water supply in say, Britain, France or Germany.
If you were asked to participate in the buy-out of a Greek water company would you be interested? Given the feeling in Greece and the attitudes of the workers to the proposed privatisations to help bail the country out, I think you would probably say no, as you value your health and you don’t want to be fired by the shareholders of your company.
I suspect very few companies will actually get involved in providing the finance, unless the prices are so low. But then if that is the case, Greece will not be able to meet its debts.
So are we back to square one with the Greeks?
No! Square zero maybe or even square minus one!
On the other hand consultancy about the privatisations might be a nice wheeze! But who will pay you, if no-one will provide the finance.
How To Fund A Dog Wash!
The Times today has an article about peer-to-peer lending by Alexandra Frean.
In it she describes how a guy called John Good from Davison, Michigan got the money to expand his car wash into the clean dog business by using a loan from Lending Club.
It’s all good stuff and just shows how the banks are missing the peer-to-peer lending market, which I think will be one of successes of the next ten years or so and probably much longer.
In the United States the systems are different to the UK, but it doesn’t totally stop them having successes. I myself use the peer-to-peer lending site, Zopa, as my deposit account as even if I run it conservatively, it gives me upwards of six percent before tax. There is risk and I have had 3 contracts out of 2359 go bad, which have cost me £322.60 or 0.6 percent of my total investment. Alexandra’s article quotes returns of 9 percent net of defaults and charges in the United States.
I could probably make a higher return, if I upped my rates, but then I’d get a higher rate of default, as I’d probably attract more risky borrowers.
I also think I’m benefiting because I’ve been lending money for some years now and have a strong feeling about how you arrange the rates to get the best value.
Are Pensions Just An Enormous Ponzi Scheme?
The title of this post was suggested by someone who I know well, who works in the City.
He has a point, as once people stop joining and contributing, it all goes belly up.
Think about it! And think too about all the rules brought in to protect the early joiners in the scheme and also to make sure that advisors get their part of your hard-earned pension pot!
The Anonymous Widower 