Friday, August 27th, 2010
In an entertaining publicity stunt organised by Barclaycard, the UK's first ever cashless busker was unveiled yesterday in Soho Square, London. Accepting contactless cards only, busker Peter Buffery, strummed on his specially designed guitar, which was fully equipped with contactless technology at the neck so that listeners could make a ...
Posted in New technologies, retail banking | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Watching BBC TV's Panorama programme on Monday night reminded me of how little is truly new. The show raked over a lot of old ground, citing authorised overdraft fees of 167 per cent per annum, which were frequently cited during the long-running OFT investigation into 'unfair' banking charges. Now, I'm not disagreeing ...
Posted in retail banking | No Comments »
Monday, May 10th, 2010
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is planning to cut another 2,600 jobs in the UK over the next year. The bank revealed most of the losses will be in its insurance division, which includes Direct Line, Green Flag, Privilege and Churchill, all of which were at one stage up ...
Posted in retail banking | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
I'd like to welcome everyone back after the Xmas break and wish you all a happy new year. For my first blog of 2010 I thought it might be an idea to highlight one of the big stories that was breaking over the Christmas period; traditionally a time when so-called ...
Posted in retail banking | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
I've just returned from an interesting roundtable this morning at Experian's offices at 80 Victoria Street, London, where the issue of bank lending to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) was very much still on the agenda. Stephen Alambritish, from the Federation of Small Business (FSB) said that many of ...
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Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Strange but true, a cash machine operator, Bank Machine, is introducing five Automated Teller Machines in East London that speak cockney rhyming slang. The usual on screen prompts and options have been replaced, so that customers going to the independent non-LINK cash machines will now be asked to enter their ...
Posted in ATMs, Cash Machines, retail banking | No Comments »
Friday, August 7th, 2009
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group reported a pre-tax profit of £15m today for the first six months of the year, but this was transformed into a £1 bn loss after paying tax and dividends to the UK government, which owns 70 per cent of the group following its rescue ...
Posted in General, Regulation, bank results | No Comments »
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
All the talk of a return of investment banking profits and, controversially, bonuses for traders and staff, was further supported this morning when Barclays announced that its pre-tax profits for the first half of 2009 rose 8% to £2.98 billion, versus the same period last year. The investment banking arm, ...
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