Community

Bit of a ding dong going on between Palmer and Aleri's Baulier on Mark Adler's Magmasystems blog - http://magmasystems.blogspot.com/2010/02/sybase-aleri-announcement-is-out.html

A digruntled Finextra reader informed Egg of this problem in mid-December and received the following response from the online-only bank.

"Unfortunately there's currently a technical issue with adding the new VISA cards on to the system. Our IT are investigating the problem and aim to have a fix in place by the beginning of the week."

This letter was sent 18th December. Since then there has been further communication from Egg and the problem persists.

Maybe the BBC will have better luck generating a fix than Egg's long-suffering customers.

Actually Keith, as in all things Finextra-related we usually look to our membership for guidance on their news interests. You'll see that we made this our top story yesterday - precisely because it had picked up the most page views as the day wore on. Now you might say that reflects badly on the rest of the day's news, but it does imply that there are a fair few people out there who are interested in what Brclays is doing here. The news interest from our perspective is that Barclays - in contrast to most of its peers - is using a creative blend of media formats - including new media channels such as YouTube and facebook - to get its message across and generate interest in its brand and its efforts in the contactless arena. And it seems to be working.

Hey Andrew, go easy on Dirk - he's a developer, not a journo. Mind you, I'm sure that I've let my share of typos slip through in the past as well. NB, we don't sub-edit or proof any posts on the Community portal. It's your shout after all.

Thanks for sharing Bo. For the record, I've posted 301 blogs on Finextra since we opened up the Community which have returned an impressive 578,992 page views.

Shripad

I'd like to add my own thanks from all of us at Finextra to yourself and our members for your contributions over the past year. We couldn't do it without the continued support of our global community. Keep up the good work.

Michael

According to our back-end admin system you did indeed post an earlier comment. However, you neglected to press the submit button to make it live on the site. If you log back in I think you'll find it's still there.

Why would a bank rather drive a credit card debtor into bankruptcy than cut off their credit line and move them to a four-year loan with certainty of repayment? Because it's more profitable to charge 30% and late payment fees on the credit card debt, assuming the poor unfortunate holding the card holds out for a couple of years before going to debtor's prison. Mike Konczal crunches the numbers.

Anybody wanting to learn more about the opportunties and threats posed by the introduction of the PSD should tune in to our live interactive Webcast on 4 December at 10am GMT (11am CET) to hear from BNYMellon, HSBC, RBS, Celent and JPMorgan and also get the latest research looking at the opportunities presented by the PSD. You can register here.

This just in: Chi-X's take on the latest outage - they're not impressed.

"Outages at the market of listing are unfortunate and we understand why they occur as systems are not infallible. Today's outage at the London Stock Exchange has however emphasised a number of issues which need to be addressed by the wider market.

"Following a technical fault, the LSE elected to put its market into ‘auction' status. Chi-X Europe does not believe that this is in the best interests of the overall market and investment community and calls instead for any venue which is disrupted to halt trading promptly and restart only when all technical problems have been completely resolved.

"The LSE putting its market into an auction phase resulted in many trading firms' systems acting as if it is a normal market event, such as the closing auction. This triggered the exclusion of routing to other trading venues, such as Chi-X Europe. Given that recently the LSE has consistently represented less than 60% of all trading in FTSE 100 stocks, the auction status hampered investors' ability to trade by not enabling participants to seek a reference price on another venue. On 9 November 2009, the LSE suffered a partial systems failure affecting a number of its securities. On this occasion trading was halted and consequently many member firms were able to switch trading to other venues trading UK stocks.

"The FSA has overall responsibility for the supervision of trading venues and market participants in the UK and an objective of ensuring market confidence. It should act to ensure that individual venues act promptly in a way that is in the interest of the overall market and allows the continuation of trading and an orderly market.

"We also urge FTSE International and other index providers to include stock trades from significant MTFs in their index calculations to ensure that derived products and arbitrage strategies based on underlying indices - such as FTSE 100 - also continue to function effectively based on the indices continuing to update when the market of listing is unavailable.

"The introduction of alternative venues under MiFID was designed to improve competition and reduce concentration risk. These objectives are not achievable while the markets of listing are able to use technical constructs to prevent normal market activity continuing.

"We call for the LSE and any other market of listing to close their market outright when outages occur in order to allow market participants to continue trading."