278 Results from 2008, /retail
Retired Member
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...
19 December 2008 /retail Transaction Banking
I've noticed my journey into work appears to be taking longer on the Northern Line these days with a deal of waiting around at Kennington. So - plenty of time to read the Metro - the free paper - which displays its Daily Mail leanings quite often. Today I spotted the story about Goldman Sachs paying out HUGE bonuses. The US-based firm lost £1.36 b...
17 December 2008 /retail
I've never received a letter quite like the one I received, over the weekend, from one of my credit card providers. It started with the sentence "Please sign and return the attached application form today to be entitled to a copy of your personal Credit Report." No point in beating about the bush, I guess. None of the flowery rhubarb y...
16 December 2008 /regulation /retail Transaction Banking
UK residents couldn't have possibly missed the furore about "Strictly Come Dancing" on Saturday - either as viewers of the programme or as observers of the news media subsequently. The events that have played out, and are still playing through, are a great advert for what happens when you don't think things through properly. There were ...
15 December 2008 /retail Transaction Banking
If anyone needed convincing that interfering with 'proper' lending decisions by forcing banks to lend makes things worse, they need only look at the latest HBOS numbers. Huge increases in bad debts from dodgy loans and yet the authorities here want them to turn the taps on again...? At the moment, a lending banker must surely be asking searching ...
12 December 2008 /regulation /retail Transaction Banking
In September, I blogged here on Finextra saying (paraphrased) 'sell NOW, we have already, it is going to get a lot more ugly and could be worse than 1929'. By my count the global job losses (based on a pretty quick scan, it is probably a lot more) is over 1m now, mostly in recent months. I've put the full list up below but the finextra site still ...
11 December 2008 /retail Innovation in Financial Services
Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra
A variation on this stat has been doing the rounds for a few weeks now, so forgive me if you've seen it before. I picked this up from the aptly-named Doomsday Report blog. In October last year, RBS paid $100 billion for ABN Amro (80% cash), and faced a fair amount of shareholder opposition to the valuation. If they were to use that money today, ac...
10 December 2008 /retail /wholesale Finextra50 fintech index
Maybe Ally Dally and GB are cleverer than some people thought. I know it's early days, but it's possible that the recovery of bank share prices could ultimately save the country descending into bankruptcy. Would the public then pat the bankers on the back...? I thought not... Take RBS as an example. Buying £12 billion of shares at 65.5. and se...
09 December 2008 /retail Transaction Banking
Peter Kinahan Senior Consultant at Intuition
Although Quicken has been around for decades, it's new tool is just another example of how innovation in the online personal financial services sphere is being driven, not by banks, but by more imaginative outfits (often newcomers such as Mint and where Wesabe). The result: banks are steadily surrendering their franchise in personal finance as th
09 December 2008 /retail Finance 2.0
The Washington Post's Security Fix blog has dug a little deeper into the attack on CheckFree's bill payment Website last week. CheckFree has admitted that hackers had, for several hours, redirected visitors to its customer login page to a Web site in Ukraine that tried to install password-stealing software. But the company has said little else abo...
08 December 2008 /security /retail
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