What is Operational Risk?

What is Operational Risk and what do the Basel Accords cover? This short video is from the Basel II Compliance Professionals Association.

Google Wallet - the opening to a whole new world

Google Wallet is a virtual wallet that stores your credit and debit cards, offers, and rewards cards. Your Google Wallet is always with you, on your phone and on your computer, for shopping in-store and online. It adds up to more speed, savings and security. Opening Google Wallet, is the opening to a whole new world.

Your phone company is watching

What kind of data is your cell phone company collecting? Malte Spitz wasn’t too worried when he asked his operator in Germany to share information stored about him. Multiple unanswered requests and a lawsuit later, Spitz received 35,830 lines of code -- a detailed, nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.

Malte Spitz asked his cell phone carrier what it knew about him-and mapped what he found out.

Breaking up the euro

Roger Bootle, winner of the Wolfson Economics Prize for his thesis on the mechanics of a Grexit, predicts a bleak future for the single currency. From The Economist.

US Treasury asks Facebook and Google to judge mobile finance app competition

The U.S. Department of the Treasury, together with partners the D2D Fund and the Center for Financial Services Innovation, has launched the "MyMoneyAppUp Challenge" to solicit ideas from the public for mobile applications to help Americans shape their financial futures everyday—even while on the move.

The Treasury Department has brought in experts from Facebook, Google and Harvard to help judge a public competition it is running to find financial services-related mobile apps.

Designs must be submitted by 12 August when they will be judged by a panel including Katie Burke Mitic, director of platform marketing at Facebook, Sendhil Mullainathan, professor of economics at Harvard, and Jonathan Weiner, business development, payments at Google.

The winning entrant will receive $10,000, two runners up $5000 and two honourable mentions $2500. They can then move on to the complimentary theFinCapDev competition to build a prototype.

Credit cards costs small business’ thousands

Retail merchants get charged a fee when you use plastic and recent US reforms don't seem to be reducing the burden on small businesses. This report from CNN Money.

South Africa’s First National Bank links its mobile banking application to Facebook

First National Bank of South Africa has linked its mobile banking application to Facebook, allowing users to run the application from within the social media site.

To run their banking through Facebook, bank clients need to link their social media profiles to their mobile banking account. Once linked they can access the 'FNB Banking on Facebook' application from within Facebook. They can check their balances, purchase prepaid products including airtime, SMS and BlackBerry bundles.

Ravesh Ramlakan, CEO of FNB Cellphone Banking says that of the 4.7 million active Facebook users in South Africa, 150 000 are FNB Facebook fans.

"As a bank, we average around 15 000 conversations monthly, via social media, with existing and potential customers," he says. "It is without a doubt that social media banking is the next frontier - to us this is a channel that will provide our customers with more choice and convenience to do their banking."

FNB also recently launched a mobile service for users to send voucher codes to their friends on Facebook. The coupons can be redeemed as pre-paid airtime or converted to cash using the bank's e-Wallet application.