Trends in Financial Services

A community to discuss the future of financial services and any other interesting trends, strategies, ideas, views.

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

HSBC humbled by Facebook protest

Banking giant HSBC has been forced into an embarrassing u-turn over interest charges on graduate overdafts following a successful protest campaign on the Facebook social network organised by the National Union of Students. The rapidly proliferating campaign, called 'Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off!', (see Finblog earlier this week), attracte...

30 August 2007 /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Stop the great HSBC graduate rip-off!

University graduates are furious at a decision by HSBC to charge interest on previously free overdrafts. UK broadsheet The Guardian reports on how thousands are now turning to Facebook in a 'viral campaign' against the bank The rapidly proliferating campaign, called 'Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off!' has already brought in thousands of rec...

28 August 2007 /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

PayPal shows banks how to blog

Billed as the official place for all things PayPal, the online payments pioneer has opened a corporate blog with the following mission statement: "We created The PayPal Blog as a forum for PayPal employees to engage with you -- to connect you with the leaders of our company and capture their insights and opinions. Most importantly, we want to...

15 August 2007 /payments /retail

Retired Member 

Questions to ask based on the MitM attack kits now available

As discussed last year, the inevitable has occurred. A couple of questions ; a) can MitM attacks successfull against token based two factor authentication b) how will software based authentication used by a few UK and Canadian Banks work against these attacks. Security vendor RSA is reporting an increase in the amount of free 'man-in-the-middle'

10 August 2007 /security

Yuvaraj Anandan Program Management at Private Bank

Innovation as Organization Culture

As I gear up to participant an Innovation forum- I spent very brief time to collect my thought about the topic which we are going to discuss: Creating a organization culture to encourage Innovation especially in Financial Service Industry. Any successful Organization or Leader will understand and acknowledge that the Innovation is a key drive for...

03 August 2007

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Royal Bank builds its own glasshouse

UK insurance group Admiral has ended talks with private equity investors about the sale of a stake in its price comparison Website confused.com. Admiral says the potential suitors put a valuation on the business of up to £650 million. This compares to the roughly £1 billion valuation of rival site moneysupermarket.com ahead of its forthcoming IPO....

13 July 2007 /retail

Yuvaraj Anandan Program Management at Private Bank

Social Media Strategy

Recently I crash landed on INGAsia-Blog and noticed post about Financial Advisor Blog. Its certainly an innovative idea, to have forum for advisors and (not just customers but)any registered users can interact and share ideas. Advisors have her/his own blog space where s/he can to share financial advice. Its brilliant both as sales & as rela...

13 July 2007

Yuvaraj Anandan Program Management at Private Bank

Next in Trading Operations and Technology

I remember reading ITAnalysis about research that the needs of customers for advanced trading functionality will mean high costs for banks over the next few years. Significantly, the sell side's technology spends of around US$400m annually on e-commerce components will nearly double by 2010. In addition, while the proportion of client volumes trad...

28 June 2007

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

ATM creator forecasts the demise of hard cash

John Shepherd-Baron, the former De La Rue executive credited with inventing the first ever cash machine back in 1967, now believes that the ubiquitous ATM will be made redundant within the next three to five years by the demise of paper cash. Inspiration for the idea of a cash dispensing hole in the wall first struck Shepherd-Baron while he was in...

25 June 2007 /payments /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

In blogs we trust

Consumer confidence in the retail banking industry has "eroded significantly", with an overwhelming majority of UK customers - 71% - saying they do not trust their banks, according to research released by Unisys. This is quite some turnaround from the early 90s, when banks were perceived as the most trusted institutions in Britain. A ras...

22 June 2007 /retail