An Aussie Take On Banking
This is a must read article on the way banking is going. This is a flavour.
Apple has 400 million account holders holding an Apple Store or iTunes account, that’s more than the top 3 banks in the world have in retail banking customers. Starbucks, which processes more than 2m transactions every week in the US, took in deposits of $US3 billion on their in-store App-based debit or gift card this year. That puts them ahead of the 6,985 smaller institutions in the US who on average did around $185 million in deposits in 2011, and the 440 midsize institutions who averaged $2.6 billion in deposits. Imagine that! A coffee company that is better at taking deposits than 95 per cent of the FDIC insured banks in the US, and they don’t even have a banking license.
So are Apple and Starbucks, the next Barclays or Visa?
Traditional banking is dead!
Zopa Do Shorter Term Loans
Zopa’s minimum loan term has generally been three years, since I have used their web site to save and invest money.
They’ve just announced that they are now going to give shorter term loans of twelve months.
I’m not sure how this will work out for lenders, but it might attract those borrowers with good credit limits, who need tiding over. It might also attract a borrower, who has never used the system and only needs a small sum for a short time and is just trying it to see if borrowing from Zopa is for them.
I wonder if Zopa are going to allow shorter term loans to be effectively rolled on. I suppose the simplest thing to do, would be to pay off the first loan and then start another. But that would be two administration fees.
The Mess That Is RBS
Just reading this article from the Guardian shows the mess the wunch of bankers at RBS got themselves into. Here’s an extract.
Clear thinking and firm principles are Royal Bank of Scotland’s best defence as it tries to negotiate its Libor fine, which could end in UK taxpayers, in effect, dispatching £400m to American taxpayers. But, in the case of Hourican’s exit, it’s hard to know what point RBS is trying to make. On the one hand Hourican’s head (we are led to believe) will be offered up in acknowledgement of the seriousness of the Libor penalty. On the other hand RBS is likely to undermine the force of this resignation by saying that Hourican would have departed anyway because his investment banking unit is to be split in two with the new heads of each section – markets and international – reporting directly to the chief executive, Stephen Hester. Since there’s no suggestion that Hourican knew about attempted Libor manipulation in the ranks, he will keep the bonuses he earned in past years.
The Guardian says it’s a muddle and if everybody in these Isles have to give a few quid to American taxpayers, how about we all sue Prudence, who to protect his Scottish majority, didn’t do the humane thing with RBS and liquidate it. I feel slightly sorry for Mr. Hourican, as I suspect, he’ll suffer badly at the hands of the tabloids, although it would appear he’s done nothing wrong.
On Line Loan Applications
Someone just tried to put a link to an on-line payday loan company in this post on my blog. As you can see the post is about wind power, so why would someone interested in wind power and Ireland, click away from the page to some dubious on-line loan provider?
I deleted the comment, as I always do with those that aren’t constructive to the blog.
But it got me thinking!
So I typed.
online loan application
Into Google to see what turned up.
The first page had about twenty links, of which only half were for legitimate sources in my view. The rest were in my view the on-line providers, that I find dubious.
I’ve also looked at my spam and note, there are quite a few payday loan companies trying to advertise using my site, but they have been stopped by the spam filter in WordPress.
Is It The Time To Put RBS Down?
RBS looks like it will be facing large fines from both the UK and US authorities according to this report on the BBC web site. The report starts with this paragraph.
Any fines by US authorities on Royal Bank of Scotland over the Libor scandal should be met by bankers not taxpayers, Chancellor George Osborne has insisted.
But even if it finds this the money to pay the fine from bankers bonuses, the saga of this worthless company just goes on. They still don’t seem to have managed to get rid of the 316 branches, that they tried to offload to Santander.
If the bank were to be put into administration, customers would do the thing, that they should be doing now and that is move their accounts to another bank.
I do wonder how many people still bank with RBS or its subsidiaries?
At the moment the bank is just a zombie, whose only use for most of us is to get cash out of their cash machines.
Would anybody except the employees miss it, if it was put down? I doubt it. But I suspect most of the good employees have already left the bank.
Only The Names Have Changed
I took this picture at Southgate station.
Only The Names Have Changed
The banks, when I passed through in the 1950s, were I think, Westminster on the left and Midland on the right. I also think there was a National Provincial there as well.
Note the period finger post in the middle of the road.
How Do You Choose An On-Line Bank Account?
If I want to choose a piece of software to say edit images, it is a fairly easy process.
I can usually try the software before I buy it and all of the charges are there in words of a couple of syllables.
If say, I want to use some form of system, to store those pictures on-line, it’s something very similar. Usually, I would try it for a few days, and if I didn’t like it, I could go and try another.
But what would Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC et al, say if I said, I’d like to try their on-line banking for a few days, to see if I liked their interface? I doubt they would be amused. Or even take me seriously!
I did try to get a pointer by typing “which on-line bank account has the best interface” into Google and all I got was adverts for on-line banking. But no serious study!
Someone should do one. I would, but I’m certain that the banks would wonder why I wanted accounts with all of them.
In other ways, the customer, who should be king, loses out all round.
Supporting Aston Villa Is Much More Stressful Than Being Governor Of The Bank Of England
This is a quote from Mervyn King, in an article in the New Statesman.
I think he ducked the match at Villa Park yesterday, as he was making a speech in Belfast.
Doing A Favour For A Friend
Last night, I renewed my friend’s domain name, as I’d originally registered it and it’s easier for me to do.
He then needed to pay me twenty four pounds, so late last night, he sent me a direct transfer to my bank account.
it was duly there this morning, when I checked my bank account.
But all the statement said, was that it was a credit of the requisite amount, labelled as just a credit.
As it was, I obviously knew what it was, so there was no problem. But surely in this day and age of good computer systems, that the banks could add a bit more detail to the statement, as soon as the money arrives.
The banks could actually use fully annotated statements as a marketing and selling point for their services.
But they don’t! No wonder people don’t like banks.
What a wunch of bankers!
Will The Co-op Bank Take Over The Lloyds Branches?
There is an article in The Times today, saying that the transfer of 632 branches from Lloyds Banking Group to the Co-op Bank is hitting various problems, mainly it appears conerned with computing.
If I was a customer of one of the branches to be transferred, I would have been off elsewhere by now, as I am one of those dinosaurs, who believe that I choose my bank and not politicians and bureaucrats from Europe.
So I suspect that if the transfer does go through, the Co-op will get some the branches without the customers.
It appears to, that a similar transfer of branches from RBS to Santander has already foundered.
It’s a real mess out there in retail banking.
The Anonymous Widower 