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3660 Results from /retail

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Options for Banks - A winner all round

I can see the benefit of enabling customers to retrieve and spend all of their money, especially for those customers that really depend on their last £10, including thse not so well off, children and students (obviously). However, this does strike me as a potentially cynical move on behalf of the ATM provider. If there is a £2 charge to collect you...

/retail

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Savers RIP...

...almost. So the authorities have shaved another 0.5% off rates to 'help the economy'. It certainly doesn't help savers (who are the only people with money to spend) and it must be of limited help to borrowers too (and in any case, I'd be putting any spare cash this did generate either on one side to meet rising repayments later, or reducing my...

/retail Transaction Banking

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

What's your Twitter password?

Quality PR from Sophos. I couldn't put it better myself: IT security and control firm Sophos is calling on Twitter to enforce the use of strong passwords by its members following the recent publication of details on how a hacker managed to gain access to Twitter's internal systems earlier this week. According to reports, the teenage hacker, who u...

/security /retail Finance 2.0

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Dirty money and the flu pandemic

It's the flu season again, so time to dust off some research first published back in May last year in which researchers discovered that the human flu virus can survive on banknotes for up to 17 days. Discussing the results ahead of publication, Yves Thomas, head of the National Influenza Research Centre at Geneva University Hospital, told Reuters...

/retail /wholesale

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Contactless Without A Choice...?

Interesting development by Barclays in adding contactless technology to all their debit cards. I wonder whether they are planning to offer people the option to opt out of the card type, i.e. have a debit card without the contactless capability...? I think that's the choice I would like to make at this point until I understood how safe it was on th...

/retail Transaction Banking

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Interest Tax Proposals Expose Financial Naivety

The economic situation we are in has amply demonstrated how Labour doesn't understand finance well enough to be left in charge of the economy. The worrying thing for me is that the Conservatives are showing a similar lack of basic understanding. What chance do we have of getting out of this mess if both parties cannot understand finance at a bas...

/retail Transaction Banking

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

The Wells Fargo - Wachovia merger blog

US bank Wells Fargo is taking its experience with social media into unchartered territory (for the banking industry) with the launch of a new blog designed to keep customers up-to-speed with progress on its merger with Wachovia. The Wells Fargo - Wachovia blog will feature regular contributions from five team members - including CEO John Stumpf - ...

/retail Finance 2.0

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Corporate Debt - A Lender's Perspective

In the paper today was a truly staggering figure - £110 billion of corporate debt that will need to be refinanced in 2009. That is probably a conservative figure, focusing only on the larger companies. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Contrary to what FDs are probably thinking, if I were still a banker, I'd be offering eye-wateri...

/retail Transaction Banking

Retired Member

Retired Member 

SEPA and PSD business case - there is still hope!

Highly praising the effort, achievement and activities of the EPC and banking community, I have an opinion that the decision on the part of the EC, ECB and national central banks / regulators to manage SEPA implementation and migration in the 'self-regulated' mode was a costly mistake. The criticism of the EPC and the banking community, although s...

/payments /retail Finexpo

Retired Member

Retired Member 

1970's Revisited

The twenty-teenies look to me as if they'll be a replay of the 1970's, here in the UK. No, I don't mean loon pants, two-tones, bad hairdos, glam-rock and tank-tops (but you never know...). No, I mean Sterling crisis, IMF, rampant inflation and industrial strife. Think about it for a minute. First, just like the '70's, we have the imminent collap...

/retail Transaction Banking

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