Technology & Finance
Monday, May 31, 2010
Glass Steagal Is 34 Pages
Nice point by Gretchen Morgenson at The Times on Sunday.
“Glass-Steagall was a 34-page document.
“The two bills that the Senate and the House are currently chewing over as part of what may be a momentous financial reordering weigh in at a whopping 3,000 pages, combined.”
And the banking lobby is working hard to make the bill less restrictive, especially on regulation of derivatives. Will this new legislation fix things? She doesn’t think so.
“According to Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va., only 18 percent of the nation’s financial sector was covered by implied federal guarantees in 1999. By the end of 2008, his bank’s research shows, the federal safety net covered 59 percent of the financial sector.”
“In a speech last week, Mr. Lacker said that he feared we were going to perpetuate the cycle of financial crises followed by taxpayer bailouts, in spite of Congressional reform efforts.”
Preventing another crisis simply requires elminating banks that are too big to fail by capping their size. Let them split up operations into separate companies. That would increase competition, probably improve profitability and would require limited regulatory oversight.
Regulation In Finance, Regulatory Arbitrage, Global Regs • Comments • Trackbacks • Permalink
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Can't Travel Web Sites Figure out User Needs?
I am trying to book a flight from Wisconsin to New York. Why does it take several hours? Because Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, HotWire are all pretty lame.
From my home north of Green Bay I can do Green Bay, Appleton or Milwaukee reasonably conveniently. In New York, I prefer Newark but LaGuardia, JFK and Westchester are all reasonably convenient. And I am happy to modify my plans by a day or two.
Can I do this on any single site? Not so far as I can tell.
I have emailed Expedia a couple of times asking why they don’t have Milwaukee as an alternative to Green Bay, instead of a bunch of tiny airports a bit closer. Milwaukee is just two hours away by highway.
One of the sites did offer a way to search nearby airports and return the results, but I couldn’t find it again on my second try.
Online travel has been around forever.
Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity are all well funded. But apparently run by a bunch of dolts.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
James Gardner Stirs up London Asking Where HSBC is with iPhone
James, Gardner, the former innovation guru at Lloyds, has made something of a splash with his blog asking what is taking so long with UK banks and iPhone-based mobile banking.
As you may recall, Gardner did an excellent book on innovation in banking which I reviewed here some months ago.
His criticism of HSBC is that they shouldn’t wait for a Big Bang but roll something out quickly to see how customers use it.
“I’ll bet that someone, somewhere, has decided that mobile is strategic, and therefore a global, multi-market solution is needed. I’d guess the whole mobile thing is so strategic to everyone that a big-bang approach seems the only way to make a splash. Never mind that you can build iPhone apps for practically nothing these days, and never mind the fact that everyone else has a mobile offering, even if its not on iPhone. I mean, even the DWP has an app these days, and we’re the government.”
Good point. At the NACHA payments conference in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, experts said that owners of high end touchscreen smart phones, such as iPhone and Android, are using mobile banking. And their numbers are growing rapidly.
And, surprise, surprise, most bankers don’t have a clue what is about to hit them. See my writeup on Banking Tech and what it means across financial services with comments from Pyxis at CIOzone.
Mobile Banking and Personal Investing • Comments • Trackbacks • Permalink