We were really interested to read the recently published mobile banking app research by MyPrivateBanking research, which looked at the app offerings of 50 major banks, finding that while the overall quality of mobile banking apps is getting better, ‘there is still a critical lack of more advanced, user-friendly features and content’.
The research looked at well-known high street names such as Lloyds TSB, Barclays, Santander, RBS, Halifax and HSBC, as well as numerous other major players from around the world. It goes on to highlight some of the apps that impressed: step forward Capital One (US), DBS Bank (Singapore) and Société Générale (France). It also explains why many others fail to score well in its ratings system. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Android, apps, Banking, Finance, ios, Nationwide, user experience
in: Banking & Finance by: Jason Woodfield | No Comments »
Unsurprisingly, the principal point of discussion at FIMA 2012 was the area of information management and the rise of its importance within the finance sector.
With regulatory pressure driving interest – hardly something the finance industry is not used to! – along with the proposed legal entity identifier which is pushing all businesses to have a growing and willing demand for detailed, even real-time, knowledge, information management was a topic that permeated almost every discussion at the three day event in London. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Data Governance, data quality, FIMA 2012, information management
in: Banking & Finance, Business Consulting by: Chris Bradley | No Comments »
Much has been made in the media recently about the monetary cost of “free banking”. In no short part thanks to a critical report by the consumer champion which? . Their report highlights that customer’s going overdrawn for two days per month without permission can end up paying between £120 and a massive £900 per year. The report elaborates on this explaining even customers who keep within their agreed overdraft limits can still face hefty charges and there is even an inherent cost for those customers staying in credit.
Unfortunately, despite the commonality and ubiquity of basic banking services, comparing the true cost of current accounts between providers is not straightforward. Certainly it is much less so than shopping around for the cheapest insurance, utility provider or the best value savings account. This is because underneath the headline values of credit, debit rates and charges, there are a plethora of complex fees and charge variations that only apply in certain circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bank Charges, Banking, Consumer, Current Accounts, Finance, Free Banking, Packaged Current Account
in: Banking & Finance by: Jason Woodfield | 1 Comment »
Last year, I wrote about whole-lifecyle SIM management. In that article I simply noted that there is a painful resource management headache in managing SIMs through their whole lifecycle that will get worse with M2M. The problem is to determine whether an idle SIM is idle because it is languishing in a land-fill site, or idle because it is waiting in a glove-box to make a life-saving emergency call. Currently, many parts of a network are hugely over-provisioned - a database serving 20 million active devices might be sized to accommodate 80 million inactive devices simply because the operator can’t tell which of those 80 million are in land-fill and which in glove-box. Read the rest of this entry »
in: Telecoms & Media by: John Boniface | No Comments »
The whole idea was so open to ridicule and cantankerous ranting from pressure groups and charities for the homeless that it must have been a publicity stunt.
In case you missed it, the 2012 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas employed homeless people to wander around the event bearing mobile 4G hotspots and selling connectivity as a service. The controversy is amusing, but the underlying problem is not easily tractable.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: NPIA, TETRA
in: Telecoms & Media by: John Boniface | No Comments »
On the 28th June IPL, in association with Osborne Clarke, held the first South West Data Forum at Osborne Clarke’s Bristol Offices. The Data Forum is designed to be a regular event, where organisations can learn, debate and exchange ideas in relation to data; how to manage it more effectively, how to comply with emerging regulation, and how to understand the threats to, and consequences of mishandling, data. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: cyber security
in: Banking & Finance by: Jon Durant | No Comments »
Network operators, law enforcement agencies and advertisers all have more or less legitimate interests in knowing about my movements. The trouble is that the available information isn’t about me at all, it’s about some devices that I sometimes have with me. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3g, identity, location, network, security
in: Telecoms & Media by: John Boniface | No Comments »
On 26th May 2012 a new cookie law came into force, UK websites would become technically illegal if they haven’t done anything towards compliance with this law. The new law stems from the EU E-Privacy Directive and is regulated and enforced by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) in the UK. The law requires websites to:
Obtain informed consent from visitors before they can store or retrieve any information on a computer or any other web connected device.
Cookies are widely used in almost all the websites for a variety of functionalities. If you own a website and are wondering whether this law affects you, the answer is mostly likely to be “Yes”. For example, if you use Google analytics or any other forms of analytics tools, even you might think you don’t use cookie yourself, you will need to inform your visitors about the analytics cookies being used. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Compliance, Cookies, EU, ICO
in: Banking & Finance, Government, Telecoms & Media by: Jon Durant | No Comments »
You can’t fail to have noticed the news about RBS banking group and their computer ‘glitch’; it has been headline news for 6 days now. The Metro went with “RBS takes a bank holiday”, others covered the knock on impact from customers who couldn’t pay for their shopping to those whose house purchases could not be completed.
The official line is that a software upgrade to the payments processing system corrupted the platform and therefore incoming funds were unable to be verified as cleared and available while outgoing payments failed for the same reason. However the issues run much deeper and RBS and Natwest are just the first to crack in a big way. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Banking, Finance, IT planning, Natwest, payments
in: Banking & Finance by: Jon Durant | No Comments »
The famous statistician George Box once said “Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models”. Mathematicians working with big data can often come to believe that their model is flawless – because based on the huge amounts of data they have, it is! However, no data set, however large, can cover every eventuality, and no model is ever perfect – the important question is whether they are good enough to be useful. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Actionable Intelligence, Big Data, data mining, predictive analytics
in: Banking & Finance, Business Consulting, Emergency Services, Government, Telecoms & Media, Transport, Uncategorized by: Beth McNally | 1 Comment »
