Latest opinions that Paul Penrose has shared on Finextra

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Paul Penrose

Head of Research

Finextra

Member since

06 Oct 2006

Location

London

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Paul's opinions

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 Trends in Financial Services

Waking up to wireless

The WSJ has reported that the hackers who made off with the credit and debit card details of 45 million shoppers at TJX, initially breached the firm’s perimeter defences through an insecure wireless network. TJX has yet to confirm the report, but according to the WSJ, opportunistic hackers used a laptop and an antenna to intercept data moving wire...

14 May 2007 /security /retail

E-gold diggers

Douglas Jackson, chairman and founder of digital cash enterprise e-gold, has mounted a spirited defence against an indictment charging e-gold Ltd., Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc., and the directors of both companies with money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmitter business, and conspiracies to commit both offences. Jackson, speaki...

04 May 2007 /payments /retail

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 Trends in Financial Services

Finextra Community: Playing the numbers game

Following Chris’s forays into the wild world of statistics this week, I thought I’d regale you with a few numbers of my own. According to my personal Finextra Community site stats, Finblog (that’s me folks) has so far notched up nearly 15,000 page views in the two months since we’ve been live. It’s a modest figure when set against the 2.5 million&...

27 April 2007 /retail /wholesale

KKR takeover of First Data: the deal goes sour for JPMorgan

Nice gossipy piece of unsourced news from Reuters about a reputed spat between Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and JPMorgan over the private equity firm’s proposed $29 billion takeover of First Data. According to Reuters’ anonymous informant, the two fell out over the future of Chase Paymentech Solutions, the joint venture processor owned 51% by JPM...

27 April 2007 /payments /retail Finextra50 fintech index

Royalblue scores big fat zero with Gartner

Royalblue’s decision to splash up to £63 million on buy-side OMS vendor LatentZero has been given a firm thumbs down by industry analyst Gartner. Unveiling the deal earlier this week, the London-based vendor played up the strategic benefit to the two companies and their respective customers "by providing, for the first time, the potential for...

20 April 2007 /wholesale Finextra50 fintech index

Human waste to plug extinct Auckland volcano

Auckland has come up with a novel plan for getting rid of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of human waste - use it to fill one of its many extinct volcanos, then turn it into a regional park. Sixty-one tonnes of the stuff will be dumped each week on the volcanic island of Puketuto. In a nice surreal touch, the local authorities say the island's ori...

20 April 2007 Whatever...

Crackberry addicts go cold turkey

Hardened Crackberry addicts in the US were forced to go cold turkey last night following an outage at Research in Motion’s network data center in Canada. The sudden blackout left users from Wall Street to Capitol Hill reeling. "I felt like my left arm had been amputated," Joe Shoemaker, communications director for Assistant Senate Democ...

19 April 2007 /retail /wholesale Whatever...

HSBC report is heavy-going

HSBC’s annual report has grown so heavy that the UK postal service is reportedly limiting the numbers its postmen may carry to prevent back injuries. The 454-page tome from the proudly carbon-neutral HSBC weighs in at a whopping 1.47kg. It includes a 100-page EU-mandated ‘business review’ and 133 pages of notes explaining its financial statements ...

13 April 2007 /retail /wholesale