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 values customer feedback

Are people more likely to switch banks to get a better deal, or because of poor customer service? That was the question asked by a YouGov survey for moneysupermarket.com back in October last year. Over a quarter (29%) of people switched as a result of poor service or a bad experience, compared with a lowly 13% who deserted for a better rate on the...

18 June 2007 /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Pimp my plantpot

How to make friends and influence people: The UK’s Co-operative Bank is promising to donate 20 pence to a children’s charity in return for people who join the bank’s list of friends at its new MySpace page. Now, we all know that buying friends on MySpace is not cool. But the Co-op has cleverly included the pay-per-friend scheme as a natural extensi...

31 May 2007 /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

HSBC and Abbey send clear message to phishermen

HSBC and Abbey have broken ranks with other UK banks and decided not to participate in a national push to supply online banking customers with two-factor authentication devices. While most of the major banks are laying plans to introduce an assortment of random-number generating systems as a supplement to basic password controls, HSBC and Santande...

17 May 2007 /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

And the award for best banking Website goes to...

We don’t usually give much currency to business awards on Finextra. In the fintech sector they’re usually just another money-making wheeze dreamt up by desperate advertising execs at trade media outlets. You know the form: buy a table for £4000 and you too could walk off with best OMS widget award for 2007. Satirical re-insurance Website riskbitz ...

03 May 2007 /retail

Retired Member 

Recovering Bank Charges - 4

See also Recovering Bank Charges - 1 Recovering Bank Charges - 2Recovering Bank Charges - 3 The 40 days are up and I called the call centre and spoke to Gary. The bank have apparently been trying to contact me (how?) to tell me that although they have received my request, they haven't received my £10. Given that this is my bank, and nowadays has ...

26 April 2007 /payments

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Chasing the US core banking market

After many years of talking about the need for core banking system replacement among US banks, it seems that foreign and domestic vendors are finally making some headway. But if the predicted boom in replacement projects emerges, where will the banks and vendors find the required technical and business staff to do the work? i-Flex has been target...

23 April 2007 /retail /wholesale

Retired Member 

Recovering Bank Charges - 3

See Recovering Bank Charges - 1 and Recovering Bank Charges - 2. Just an update I am afraid - no results, yet! I hadn't heard from the Alliance & Leicester so over the weekend I called their call centre for an update. 'We do have 40 days in which to respond you know Mr. Doyle', Anne in Ashford said; 'and it is only 35 days'. She was somewhat ...

16 April 2007 /payments

Retired Member 

Paypal - a brief history from Chris

Superb piece of research from Chris, detailing Paypals history since inception in Dec 98, with statistics, and more importantly, why they were successful. "In fact, although many of us think PayPal displaces banks, it actually enhances banking services as demonstrated by the bank services behind PayPal. For example, PayPal runs through Wells F...

11 April 2007 /payments /retail

Retired Member 

ABN Amro problem was predictable

I blogged here last August, that it was predicted Man in the Middle attacks would defeat tokens, and sure enough here we go. "The bank says that its customers opened an email attachment that resulted in a virus being executed on their machines. This virus changed their browsers' behaviour so when they went to open the real ABN Amro online ban...

03 April 2007 /security

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

HSBC bluetooth marketing: Spam, or not spam?

Spam (noun) is commonly defined as an unsolicited commerical message sent indiscriminantly to mass recipients. Is this what HSBC is trialling in the name of marketing? The initial message it is sending out to all activated phones near its branches is certainly unsolicited (though one could argue that if people leave their bluetooth turned on all th...

02 April 2007 /retail