Blog entries tagged 'Financial Services'

The cost of the Millennial on the Baby Boomers and Generation X'ers'

mahill510

A recent CBS 60 Minutes show highlighted the gap between the Baby Boomers, those people born between 1946 and 1965, Generation X, those people born between 1965 and 1980, and the New Generation Y or Millennial's, those people born between 1980 and 1995. Highlighted below is a news article in a British Newspaper that describes the angst I am referring to.

Each older generation, has typically been critical of each newer generation, IE the "incumbent generation& [...]

Payday Lending Predatory Tactics

mahill510

I've just read two very damning articles sent to me by a reader of this blog about Payday Lenders. The 1st article from the Dallas Morning News, involving the local government of Mesquite, Texas's decision to minimize the number of Payday lenders within 1,000 feet of a similar business, and each must be in a freestanding building at least 200 feet from residential areas and 500 feet from freeways, a month after Richardson, Texas imposed similar restrictions due to some of the l [...]

Circle K - Bill Payment Boon in El Paso with TIO and El Paso Electric

mahill510

With the innovation of eCommerce in various local municipalities as a service to the unbanked or under banked, auto-payment services through merchants with their customers that have bank accounts, billing beinf either pre-paid, or billed to your cell phone each month, as well as banks trying to regain eCommerce market share with an under banked communities of interest, why are kiosk application not more readily available to the unbanked?

This April, 2008, El Paso Electric c [...]

Euronet ends MoneyGram pursuit

mahill510

E-payments processor and ATM operator Euronet Worldwide says it will not launch a new bid to acquire fund transfer outfit Moneygram due to the slowdown in the debt and equity markets.

Euronet made an unsolicited $1.65 billion bid to acquire MoneyGram in December 2007. The stock offer valued MoneyGram at $20 per share - some 40% higher than the stock's price at the time - but was rebuffed by MoneyGram.

Earlier this month MoneyGram agreed [...]

IRS Warns Taxpayers of New E-mail Scams

mahill510

Phishing, as we all know is a mass e-mail scam used to induce the email recipient into providing confidential information that can then be used to gain access to private information.

A new scam has started to proliferate throughout the Internet, involving the IRS. The latest approach as posted on the IRS web site this past January 14th provides more detail. These e-mails often target small business owners, as they are the most common targets of IRS audits.

[...]

What about H.R. 3678???

mahill510

In my blog "3 Ways to Address Customer Service issues during the Christmas Rush" I reference Governor Spitzer 8% state wide and 8,375% in the City tax on internet purchases for large retailer sales, like Amazon.

Interesting enough, in all of the comments I received, no one pointed out the October 31, amendment to "Internet Tax Freedom Act Amendment Acts of 2007", which appears to be grounds for a challenge by some enterprising group of Tax Attorney's [...]

3 Ways to Address Customer Service issues during the Christmas Rush

mahill510

With the Christmas holiday upon us, customer service takes on a new dimension with all of the checkout lines, increase anxiety, hordes of people, of varying character, inventory losses, theft, anger, and a number of battles by angry shoppers reachingfor that last scarf...

Adding to the confusion is the methods of payments as well as where the new consumer will purchase their goods and services for the holiday season. In the fore front, Consumers are looking to change their buying [...]

Incentives To Increase Electronic Bill Payment

mahill510

In an effort to increase the number of consumers who receive and pay their bill electronically, Qwest Communications offered to donate 1% of the consumer's bill to their school district if the consumer switched to electronic bill presentment and payment. Qwest offered this incentive to its consumers in an effort to cut down on the high cost of paper billing and payment. While Qwest did not specify exactly how much money they save for every person that switc [...]

What Measures Should You Capture For Your Budget?

mahill510

As the year comes to an end, yes, there are less than 8 weeks to go; we look at developing information that will ultimately find its way into next year's budget. Budgets for the most part have already been accounted for with regards to

the 2008 calendar year, at this point, and management knows what expenses may need to be cut, as well as what purchases may require further scrutiny.

But now is the time to build your business case to insure funds are available fo [...]

CFSI�s Innovators Roundtable study of the underbanked market

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The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) announced a new study with a number of financial institutions, which have identified the underbanked or the unbanked as a boon into capturing a greater market share for their financial service offerings.

CHICAGO (BusinessWire)--The Center for Financial Services Innovation announced today the initiation of the first comprehensive, authoritative national segmentation study of the underbanked market. Citi, eFunds (now [...]

Google patents SMS payments system

mahill510

Over the years, with the advent of digital subscriber lines on Cell phones we all have stories of how you can use the IR port on your phone, or now Bluetooth to make payments. In February 2006 Google filed a patent for a "text message payment" system.

The abstract discusses a "computer-implemented method of effectuating an electronic on-line payment" while the patenttalks about how the system will work and why it is useful:

The payment process may occur [...]

Set your content free to get more leads

mahill510

By Marc Osofsky

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Optaros' VP of marketing explains why B2B companies need to scrap registration, and add search and syndication to their lead-generation strategy instead.

Nearly every company offering products and services to other businesses (B2B) uses the same strategy to generate leads from their websites: namely, create some content (whitepapers, podcasts, etc.) and fo [...]

Will Lending Club moves out of Facebook impact banking as we know it today?

mahill510

Lending club is becoming an anomaly that is taking hold with a select group of consumers that act as both the source for capital and the borrowers. As every banker knows, lending money involves certain risks the same risk that are mitigated through a bank are utilized by Lending Club, that only allow "those borrowers that can be authenticated and have prime credit scores (640+). We also use proprietary technology called LendingMatchTM to help you identify the right borrowers [...]

US consumers lose billions to online scams

mahill510

07 August 2007 - 13:24

US consumers have lost more than $7 billion to viruses, spyware and e-mail phishing scams over the past two years, according to new research released by Consumer Reports.

The research - which is based on CR's 2007 "State of

the Net" survey of more than 2000 households with Internet access - predicts that a million victims have lost money to e-mail phishing scams in the past two years. The median cost of a phishing incident is [...]

German cops arrest phishing gang

mahill510

German police have arrested an international phishing gang that allegedly used spam e-mail to unleash trojan programs designed to steal bank account details and passwords.

The gang, which includes Russian, Ukrainian, and German suspects, is alleged to have targeted online banking customers with phishing e-mails claiming to come from organisations includingDeutsche Telekom, eBay, Walmart and Ikea. Attached to the e-mails were malicious Trojan programs that stole information from th [...]

Assets and Opportunity Scorecard Released TODAY - Texas Once Again

mahill510

Our Grade Is In: Texas Receives "F" in Financial Stability

Today, the Center for Public Policy Priorities (CPPP) and the Texas Asset Building Coalition (TABC) released the results of the 2007-2008 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard. The scorecard, developed by the national Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), ranks the 50 statesand Washington, DC on their performance in 84 outcome and policy measures. Through a grant from CFED, CPPP and TABC [...]

Mobile banking set to soar in US - report

mahill510

The number of US customers using mobile banking services is set to surge in the next few years and will rise from 1.6 million in 2007 to 35 million by year-end 2010, according to Boston-based research consultancy Aite Group.

The number of customers taking up mobile banking will jump from 1.6 million in 2007 to 9.5 million in 2008, according to the research. The number is set to double in 2009 to 21.1 million users before hitting 35 million users in 2010.

Aite [...]

6 ways to generate buzz

mahill510

<p>By Lois Kelly

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The author of "Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing" provides these tips.

Most companies don't have really cool products and services that naturally spark buzz. So marketers often think that word-of-mouth marketing is not an option.

Wrong.

The missing ingredient in word-of-mouth marketing is having [...]