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From the major subprime losses reported by the banks, to the investment bankers losing their spouses, to the city traders who no longer enjoy their love life, times are bad.
Outside the City we also see the issues, from soaring energy prices and inflationary pressures through to the collapse of the housing market and redundancies. But there are a few other stories that may not have been reported, which I personally found of interest.
I met David Birch yesterday, or Dave to his friends, guru of all things to do with mobile and card payments. Lovely chap.
What I did not realise is that he's also seriously subversive and in danger of being exposed to the Government's new 42-day detention criteria for being a dodgy chappie.
What do I mean? What has he done? Is Dave an urban guerrilla, terrorist or Jehovah's Witness?
No. He's just a little bit like me and posted an interview with Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom on his blog.
However, Sir Bonar's extreme views on the podcast were not endorsed by the Government, Gordon Brown or any other Whitehall correspondents. It has been viewed as being out of order by all civil servants and by many of the networking powers that be, as can be seen by this entry on Boing Boing.
The result is that Government officials are now interviewing Dave in a locked room in Scotland Yard in their efforts to track down Sir Bonar, who has gone into hiding.
As I've been talking about the internet this week, it's noteworthy
that Amazon have just launched two new simple payments services.
Checkout by Amazon
allows you to take all the payments functionality that Amazon offer
–auto calculation of payment, shipping and taxes, promotion codes,
customer feedback reviews – and place these on your own website.
Amazon Simple Pay allows internet shoppers to use their Amazon payment details on your website, without the additional functionality.
In doing this, Amazon are leveraging their 1-Click* payment method to other non-Amazon websites.
For those unfamiliar with the 1-Click service, it is a method for
Amazon customers to keep all their payments information – credit card,
address, name and password – in their Amazon account. Therefore, when
it comes to ordering, you just click and it’s paid. No need to enter
the card and billing information because it is all stored in your
Amazon account.
With the launch of these services yesterday, Amazon extend their offers
significantly, with the aim of becoming the choice host for e-commerce
payment services outsourcing. In other words, as an online retailer,
rather than using PayPal or Google Checkout, use Amazon.
This is where it gets really interesting therefore, when you compare pricing models.
Amazon's costs for the new services are quite high at 2.9% plus $0.30¢
for every transaction of $10 or less, rising to 5% plus $0.05¢ for
every transaction over $10. Volume discounts also kick in.
That’s an interesting pricing model as, amazingly, PayPal
charge 2.9% plus $0.30¢ for every transaction. However, PayPal do not
differentiate between high value versus low value payment pricing but
only offer bulk discounts.
Mind you, Google Checkout is free!
For every $1 spent on Google advertising, merchants can process $10 in
sales for nothing. Alternatively, if you don't use Google adwords or
don't spend enough on advertising, the charges are a lot lower at 1.5%
plus $0.30¢ per transaction.
Let the battles begin.
* Bankers may also like to note that 1-Click is available on the mobile phone too!
They don’t provide an easy way of judging
individual website rankings however. For that, apart from Alexa, other sites
such as Compete are
really useful.
As previously discussed, a new search engine called Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') is launched this week.
Developed by former Google employees, Cuil claims to be better because it indexes more web pages - 120 billion versus 40 billion - and uses contextual searching to return more accurate results. They also reckon that Cuil is more respectful of the user's privacy.
Alexa looks at site traffic for all sorts
of companies, and shows how popular they are against a global index. For example, here are
the most popular internet sites of all worldwide:
1. Yahoo 2. Google 3.
YouTube 4. Windows Live 5. Microsoft
Network 6. MySpace 7. Wikipedia 8. Facebook 9. Blogger 10. Yahoo (Japan)
Going through their top list of the Global
500, it’s interesting that once you get through all the social networks,
search engines, news services, auction and shopping sites, technology, sex and
gambling destinations … you start to find banks just outside the Top 200.
Google blog about the fact that they've just exceeded indexing over 1 trillion unique URLs.
That's 1,000,000,000,000.
That's 1,000 times more than the billion pages they reached on their indexes in 2000, which was 400 times more than the 26 million pages they indexed way back in 1998.
1,000,000,000,000 unique web pages.
What are they all saying?
According to Wired magazine, not a lot.
In a great article called "Internet Famous: Julia Allison and the Secrets of Self-Promotion", Wired tell us the story of Julia. "She can't sing. She's not rich. But thanks to a
genius for self-promotion, she's become an Internet celebrity."
In other words, there's a lot of vain folks out there using the internet to shamelessly promote themselves with no actual talent involved.
Mind you, isn't that the reason why so many of us, including yours truly, are blogging and searching the internet?
For example, a paragraph from the Wired story: "Come on, admit it: You've spent a good half hour trying to pick out
the most flattering photo to upload to your MySpace page. You struggle
to come up with the mot juste to describe your Facebook status. You
keep a bank of self-portraits on Flickr or an online scrapbook on
Tumblr or a running log of your daily musings on Blogger. You
strategically court the gatekeepers at StumbleUpon or Digg. You compare
the size of your Twitter-subscriber rolls to those of your friends. You
set up Google Alerts to tell you whenever a blogger mentions your name."
This is according to a survey performed by PSE Consulting and published on Euractiv yesterday. The Payment Services Directive (PSD) is the bit of integrating Europe's low value payments systems that provides the legal support for the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). The only thing is that it goes a lot further in its wordings, implications and ramifications. Watch this space.
The phrase “a borderless, neutral single market for securities across Europe” is
one that appears regularly throughout all communications on settlements services
from the European Central Bank (ECB) and European Commission.
In fact, it appeared a lot last Friday,
when the ECB released two key documents: the TARGET2 for Securities (T2S) User
Requirements and Collateral Central Bank Management (CCBM2) User Requirements
(863
page, 4.4MB and 201
page, 1.5MB pdf document download respectively).
The importance of these two announcements, in the context of
Clearing and Settlement, cannot be stressed enough as the combination of T2S and
CCBM2 are intended to create this "borderless, neutral single market for
securities across Europe" by creating a single infrastructure for counterparty
liquidity and collateralisation.
I've blogged lots about social networks, social media, Web 2.0, blogs, mobile banking, mobile payments, internet banking and more. My continual gripe has been: where is the Bank 2.0? I've been talking about it, but I've never seen one.
Today, I saw the first Bank 2.0.
It's Spanish.
It's BBVA.
Rather than repeating the description here, you can find it all at their design partner's website, a firm called Strands.
Personalistion with total customisation, recommendation engines, comparison tools, aggregation, financial widgets, cross-platform and device neutral for both internet and mobile access, and more.
The International Central Securities Depositories
(ICSDs) of Euroclear and Clearstream are very competitive with and against each
other and, as mentioned yesterday, there are many other services that CSDs offer
other than just settlement. The Linked Up Markets group and other activities are
starting to change the landscape of these end game post-trade activities but,
right now, the more interesting area for me is Clearing.
This is because
we have two significant new clearing facilities in Europe: the EuroCCP from the
DTCC and the European Multilateral Clearing Facility (EMCF) from Fortis. This is
not to overlook x-Clear from SIS in Switzerland or other movers and shakers, but
EuroCCP and EMCF are, for me, indicating the future trends in Clearing and
Settlement.
Great example here of social media websites that
rock, according to mashable.com.
Of the 35 corporate websites chosen, including Blendtec (my favourite),
Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dell, Ford, IBM, Marriott, McDonalds, the New York Times,
Starbucks, Toyota and Xerox, three financial firms make the lists:
All well and good, and HSBC, Visa and Wells Fargo should
be proud.
Or should they?
Another website, readwriteweb.com, posted a story last week saying that corporate social
networks are a waste of money. As cited in their story, the Wall Street Journal reports that corporate social networks
have less than 100 members in 35% of cases, and only a quarter exceed 1,000
members.
Certainly the lack of members is true for HSBC and
Visa, where I found no members and only seven guests online with the former, and a total of 686 fans of the latter. And
these things look quite expensive.
The problem maybe that these networks are very heavily corporately
branded. Corporate networks only work if they are social, not if they are
heavily corporately branded (discussed in depth in other websites, such as the
Marketing & Strategy Innovation blog). And I totally agree therefore with the view of the readwriteweb:
“Social
networks, where a brand name product is what everyone rallies around, are a dumb
idea. They are stupid. No one should submit themselves to the indignity of
creating a user profile and friend connections based on cola or cat
litter.”
This is why I much prefer Fortis’s Join2Grow, as
the branding is not there. You may then wonder: what's the point? Well
the point is that, if the network works, then the community will find your
brand and applaud it. For example, Fortis's brand is there if you want to
find it, checkout the bottom left hand corner of the homepage.
That’s
the secret for corporate social networks. Build first for the
network and second for the brand.
This is exemplified by Bank of America’s Small Business Community website which, when it started, looked very similar to HSBC’s. Bank of America branding all over it.
Today, however, it looks much more like Fortis’s Join2Grow website and just has
a little 'powered by Bank of America' in the top right hand corner.
The core of this is that corporate social networks
only work if the corporation butts out and lets the people network.
I'm not sure how far this series will run but, like the numbers series, I thought I would start a "can't hide anything" series. This is where information is leaked so fast it could be completely transparent.
The star of the first of the series is Microsoft.
This is nothing to do with my previous posts on Microsoft (you know that story) but, yesterday, Kevin Johnson left the firm. Kevin was the President of Microsoft's Platform and Services Division, and the point person for Microsoft's failed bid to buy Yahoo!
So the news comes out that he's left and Steve Ballmer, CEO, sends out an internal memo explaining what's going on at 4:30 Pacific Time (PT). At 5:46 PT, Kara Swisher has posted the whole thing on her blog. Here are a few highlights:
VISTA "With SP1 and the work we’ve done with PC manufacturers and our
software ecosystem, we’ve addressed device and application
compatibility issues in Windows Vista. Now it’s time to tell our story.
In the weeks ahead, we’ll launch a campaign to address any lingering
doubts our customers may have about Windows Vista."
APPLE "In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1.
But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are
good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete."
GOOGLE "We are going to reinvent the search category through user
experience and business model innovation. We’ll introduce new
approaches that move beyond a white page with 10 blue links to provide
customers with a customized view of their world."
YAHOO "Yahoo was a tactic, not a strategy. We want to accelerate our share
of search queries and create a bigger pool of advertisers, and Yahoo
would have helped us get there faster. But we will get there with or
without Yahoo."
THE FUTURE "The future is about having a platform in the cloud and delivering
applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in
the home."
In the context of Clearing and Settlement, we have an
issue.
The issue is one of transparency, access, interoperability and
accounting.
The European Commission, Alberto Giovannini, the Code of
Conduct and the Monitoring Group have all tried to change this, but it is not
changing fast enough.
What’s the problem?
The problem is
that
you cannot compare apples-with-apples;
clearing and settlement involves many constituencies that are fragmented and
protecting their turf;
settlement is dictated often by national rules of company law and taxation
systems; and
there’s no incentive to change, not even the threat of punitive measures by
the European Commission, because CCP’s and CSD’s have protection from both
governmental and historical structures in many instances.
For those who bank online and want to be educated about phishing, spam, online security and viruses through an easy-to-follow ABC video, then Barclays are your bank.
A new vidcast launched last week that is quite educational and interesting, and talks about PINSentry and all that good stuff.
Worth a viewing for the uneducated ... after all, you can now say that if your customer is compromised and they haven't watched this, then what were they doing?
If you haven't spotted it, Bloomberg is running a great analysis of the challenges Citigroup faces and particularly what their latest CEO, Vikram Pandit, is trying to achieve.
A small, windowless room, in
the lower halls of the European Parliament.
The euro is almost here and
the European Central Bank has just been inaugurated.
High
value settlement systems are in play and central banks can process euro’s across
the Eurozone therefore.
Phew!
This meeting has been called to find
out what to do next.
“I think we need a plan”, says one bright
spark.
“What a good idea”, says the eurocrat. Then his brow furrows and
he looks at the young, pin-stripe suited proposer and asks, “And exactly what
sort of plan are you thinking of?”
“Well”, says the nervous tick, “maybe
one with some action in it. Some action for the banks, of course. Not us, I
mean.” You can see the first signs of a cold sweat forming on the
forehead.
“Ah”, says the eurocrat. “An Action Plan. An Action Plan for
banks. I like it.” A thin smile forms on the veneer of the administrator’s lips.
“But, you know, it’s far more than banks so I think we should call it: The
Financial Services Action Plan.”
A round of applause. Everyone is happy
and the young proposer breathes a sigh of relief.
“And what should be in this plan, I wonder?” says the
eurocrat.
You could cut the atmosphere with a knife as everything goes
silent and a small dim of gloom illuminates the room.
We make the financial world
incredibly complex and, because I’m going to spend
the whole week talking about Clearing & Settlement, we need to simplify it. In order to do that, I thought I would relay a conversation I had over the weekend where I tried to explain capital markets to a friend,
and it boiled down to something like this: the Financial System is just One, Great Big, eBay.
The Royal Bank of Scotland's insurance division, Churchill, are in deep water over their latest advert using the Whitesnake song, "Here I Go Again", as background.
No, not for using the Whitesnake song, but for sneaking in the F-word at the end of the advert.
Listen to this yourself:
OK, so you've got to be some sort of deviant teen prankster to work out that "Ooohhh, yesssss (fook)" is what he says but, with a strange twist of the ear, it is just about in there.
Well done to my friends in the Churchill Marketing Group who snuck that one in. And yes, you know who I'm talking about Chris ;-)
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