Community

In the UK pre-payment of expenses or expense allowances present significant problems to the individual with the tax authorities. HM Revenue & customs is very happy to see itemised expenses paid in arrears, but is liable to investigate pre-payment of expenses or expense allowances.

Nothing beats the old-fashioned branch manager, who has the data to hand and can look the potential borrower in the eye and ask searching questions. The day that branch managers became dinasaurs was the day that banks became 100% dependent on data (usually incomplete and often inaccurate), but had no way of evaluating the plans of the business or the individual, Past history is only one of the factors in lending. Future plans are equally important. How do banks evaluate those future plans by evaluating data?

Whilst robotics can reduce the mundane, it cannot assess an individual. Loans and overdrafts were originally reviewed by the branch manager or deputy and has now been replaced by rules based loan and overdraft assessment. In my view the personal aspect was very important when assessing the individual or business.

The comparison is that the Mayor of London has made a statement that he intends to reduce deaths on the road in London by 2030 using camera tecnology. Whilst the camera may pick up speeding drivers (where the speed limit is an arbitary number often set 70 years ago in a different era) I would love to know how a camera will pick up a drunk driver, an unlicenced driver or someone on the telephone.

How is the robot going to pick up whether the individual or business owner is an alcoholic, drug user, a liar or a cheat? In addition, how does each bank differentiate itself if most of it's customer interface is robotic? They will all be the same to the potential customer.

Any sharing of data with Facebook should be the a choice of the individual, not their bank. If the banks give this data away without the permission of their customers, then they should be prepared for potential class action suits.

There is no mention of why it lasted so long, nor why it took so long to discover. It is no use blaming the coding error. It is up to human intervention to pick up the problems.

Excellent analysis. Let us not forget that cash is always an option

An excellent analysis. No-one has yet sold the general public on Open Banking, nor has anyone taken the trouble to provide a list of benefits - not a list of features & functions, but a list of benefits.

Chatbots (or pop-ups as they were known 15 years ago) are annoying and get in the way of reading the page. They were unpopular then and are just as annoying now. I have reduced my usage of LinkedIn and eBay for this very reason.

Excellent comment from Astrid. Whilst cash is in fast decline in the Nordic countries, it is not elsewhere. 

Yet another person predicting the demise of cash in five years. It is not going to happen in the next 20 years, certainly not in the US and Germany, two of the largest economies in the western world. It may happen in the Nordic countries, but they represent just five of the 200+ countries in the world and less than 1% of the world population. I do accept that cash is slowly being replaced by many electronic alternatives, but not to the level of your prediction in just five years.