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Dave

Interesting perspective. 

In its results statement last week, Monitise commented: "We are seeing strong interest from consumers for the service, especially those of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, and expect its pipeline of mobile banking consumers to grow significantly during the second half due to its major planned marketing activity."

Are Monitise being over-optimistic?

That's hilarious. What kind of message were they hoping to put across here: Buy stock! Feel sick!

Internet bank Egg has decided to rid itself of 161,000 of its credit card customers (approximately seven per cent of its customer base) who have been deemed as having 'higher than acceptable risk profiles". Egg was acquired by Citigroup last year and the decision may be seen as a sensible move by the US bank to re-adjust its risk profile in the wake of the global credit crunch. But wait. Is there a hidden agenda at work? It seems that some of the customers caught in the net are those pesky types who use their cards only occasionaly and pay off their balance in full at the end of the month. They claim they are being axed because they don't make enough money for Egg. Senior MPs - some of whom have received their pink slips from Egg - are demanding an Office of Fair Trading investigation...

Apple recently introduced a new icon feature that enables companies to drop their corporate logo onto the home page of the iPhone screen, thus providing a direct link to their Web site. Wachovia in the US is one of the first major banks to have an iPhone Web clip app ready for customer adoption.

So Pete, when can we see the Finextra logo appear on your iPhone screen?

The City of London was yesterday awash with rumours that SocGen's desperate race to clear up the damage and unravel Kerviel's trading positions were at the heart of the stockmarket turmoil on Monday when share prices across Europe crumbled by 7%. Even the insistence of the French prime minister, François Fillon, that SocGen had "nothing to do with the situation on the financial markets" failed to stop the gossip.

We tried to get the Boat people to speak at Finexpo, but they declined, leaving us with the distinct impression that all was not well with the venture. The Reuters' report confirms this, but cites only the banking coalition's wish for an independent entity as the reason for the spin-off.  Markit's a smart company,  but if the problems go deeper they may yet struggle to turn it around. A successful sale would require cast-iron guarantees from the coalition members that they would continue to use the Boat platform as customers.

We've bigged up some our banking keynotes here - including Turquoise chief Eli Lederman, Lee Hodgkinson virt-x CEO, Stavros Siokos from Citibank, Credit Suisse's George Andreadis, Marc Bayle from the ECB, Udayan Goyal from Deutsche Bank and David Clark from the IOR.

But I might also try to catch up with some of the vendor sessions. A few that took my eye include, Mike Powell of Reuters on low latency trading hype, the post-trade processing panel session for OTC derivatives chaired by Message Automation, and HP's Anne Ambrose on eco-friendly technologies for trading operations. Finally, I think I'll pop along to the final session of the day and keep Andrew Douglas of Swift company as he asks: Alberto, are we nearly there yet?

PS In relation to the second headline above, check-out David Griffith's related post, and in particular the appended comment from Keith Appleyard.

While reading the report in question I was attracted to another news story on the site from the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas - For those who like a little music with their personal protection: the taser that plays MP3s.

The world is surely going to hell in a handcart. 

David

Excellent post. It should make for an interesting test case. If Halifax anticipates that Mr Job has any chance of winning the argument in court then they will quietly settle up - the banks can't afford to set a precedent that could be used in other phantom withdrawal claims.