Community

In paying for long term parking a year ago in a city that I had never visited before I was able to pay using my mobile device by texting my car registration number followed by the parking space number to the parking lot manangement company. The fee was charged to my mobile device account. No bank was involved. I would welcome doing the same at any parking meter or parking lot.

Why do we need wallets? Who needs a bank? Why not charge direct to the mobile device account?

I would be interested to know just how many Co-op customers use Twitter (or FaceBook). I doubt that the majority do.

My teenage son uses niether, having been bullied at school. He tells me that Twitter and FaceBook are relentlessly used by bullies. He has Skype and e-mail and seems very happy to communicate that way.

As a result, your last paragraph talking of 'the power of Twitter' does not ring true. It is one of many tools that banks need to empower, but certainly not the only one.

A very good description of core banking systems developed in the 1960s and 1970s, a considerable number of which are still being used by major banks.

The key, as you say, is that they are account and transaction based. They are not customer based. As a result, when a customer has four acounts - a current account, a savings account, a credit card and a loan / mortgage - linkage has to be established to tie them together, making the system over complex for what should be simple linkage.

The sooner major banks still using 40+ year old systems bite the bullet and decide to replace their aging systems, the more chance they have of surviving in the second decade of the 21st century.

The key to customer service is how the organisation handles something which has gone wrong.

In my experience telcos are awful at this. Banks are not a lot better, but have improved significantly in recent years.

Telcos are no more customer centric than financial institutions when it comes to resolving problems.

I'm at a loss to understand why anyone needs to access their bank account through a mobile device. I do not know anyone who needs to access their bank account more than once per day and most do not need to access it more than once or twice per week.

Using a smart phone whilst shopping in store has nothing to do with mobile banking. To quote Daryl Huff, the author of 'How to Lie with Statistics', this is a semi-attached statistic.

And the wonderful quote that 80% of American consumers think that mobile banking is important. Have you travelled around the US, outside of the big 5 US cities? The figure of 80% is outlandish and so far wrong it is laughable. I wonder how large Verve Mobile's survey was out of the 320 million people living in the US.

So why do you have to pay with cash or a card - why not pay on the phone?

In ten years of using internet banking I have never, ever, received a phishing attempt addressed to me by name - they are always dear customer. My bank sends e-mail addressed to me by name and also provides my postcode.

I'm quite happy with my bank security. If people are foolish enough to respond to e-mails that are not addressed to them, then they have to face the consequences.

You obviously joined in a different City to me. Whilst 'My word is my Bond' was prevalent in the late 60s and throughout the 70s, many of the bankers that I met were just as morally bankrupt and without conscience as those today. There was large scale stagging of new issues on the stock market (the Guiness affair was in the mid 80s and was a common event - the Guiness people just got caught). I was party to the discovery, in 1977, of a bet that had gone wrong by a foreign exchange dealer to the tune of £3,500,000, a huge sum then. All that happened was that he was sent packing. He was not prosecuted.

The same things are happening today as happened in the 60s and 70s. The difference is, once they are discovered, senior manangement find it much more difficult to sweep them under the carpet. The regulations in place and instant communication make it that much more difficult.

Mel Haskins

Dear Bo

Dream on. As someone who voted in a referendum in the 1970s in the UK to join the EEC, I did not sign up to the EU. The only way for an integrated Europe to work is political and fiscal union.

There is no united Europe because each country has it own philosophy of life. The whole idea of the EEC was a free trade area. What is wrong with that and why do we need political and fiscal union?

Mel Haskins

As a UK company, wouldn't it be great if they had a centre of excellence in the UK.