Price Comparision Taking Centre Stage

Sites that help consumers compare the price of different banking and financial products have been around for years. MoneySupermarket.com, Confused.com, Insure4less.com, ApnaLoan.com (in India) have all been available online. Many of them, like the ones in India, have been operating on the fringes. While ApnaLoan was one of the early Internet only service that took off and sustained itself beyond the bubble, lack of awareness has made it a niche site that very few consumers actually use. Now things may be about to change with some big names in business like Tesco Personal Finance in the UK planning to set up a price comparision shop. One of the interesting things about the purchase of these services are that most consumers got out and seek information from friends and colleagues on products and services they use. As we all know, you need an existing account holder to refer you to the bank, before you can actually get a bank account in India. Despite this very few banks have gone on to create communities and forums where users can come and share information about their experiences with different products. Will Tesco show us the way, one wonders.

Art Of Money

Justine Smith is an artist with a unique talent. She plays with money to create her art. A well known collage artist, Justine recently moved to making art using the banknote and knife. Her work as an exploration of our relationship with money and our response to it, in a political, moral and social sense, while exploiting the physical beauty of the note. For the artist, a banknote is not only an abstract representation of our labour, but the imagery depicted on it also symbolises the ideas and ideals of a given country’s culture and the society that its people live in. ‘Money Map of the World’ compounds many of Smith’s ideas relating to money. This piece of work took seven months to produce and is made up of banknotes from every country in the world. Smith’s series of flowering plant sculptures and gun sculptures investigate the ideas of extinction, corruption and the impact of power and money on an individual. Discover more here.

20 Years Of Debit

Two interesting milestones in modern banking are being celebrated this year. The 40th anniversary of ATMs, the first one was installed by Barclay’s in June 1967. 20 years ago in June, the Barclay’s, once again, launched the first Debit cards in the UK And since its introduction, the debit card has transformed the way we pay. Many people in the West can’t imagine a world without cards. According to the UK Association of Payment Professionals, before the launch of debit cards, 6% of all supermarket transactions were conducted using credit cards. Today the card usage, both credit and debit as jumped to 66%. While the reason for the use of cards could be many, these cards themselves are facing an uncertain future. With services like Electronic Money and payments using mobile phones, cards could soon be consigned into the dustbin of history.

Low Income Money Transfers

In an effort to provide financial services to the thousands of un-banked people across UAE, Emirates Bank (More from the Emirates Bank) site has signed an agreement with Infospan Inc, a California based technology company, to launch a unique global service that will enable users to send and receive money instantly around the world. The Bank is planning to reach-out to a large, underserved and market of low-income, emigrant workers with a unique all-in-one payment card that can be easily echarged at hundreds of locations across the UAE. The service will be available through a variety of channels including SMS, call centers, and ATMs.

Brand planning moves on

Johnson & Johnson has broken new ground to separate communications planning as a separate media assignment and awarded North American duties on the task to three shops: independent Naked, WPP Group’s JWT and Interpublic Group’s Sandbox, the client has confirmed. While communications planning is gaining favor among U.S. marketers, J&J is believed to be one of the first major domestic firms to hold separate and simultaneous reviews for traditional media planning/buying and communications planning. Traditional media planning is largely tactical and mainly focused on the weight that should be given to individual networks, stations, dayparts and publications. Communications planning is strategic and tries to develop overall marketing plans for brands, taking into consideration all channels, including but not limited to traditional and emerging media, public relations, viral marketing, sports and entertainment marketing and event planning. This change comes just weeks after J&J asked agency networks to reintegrate media planning back into creative agencies.

Talent. Grow Your Own.

Any knowledge business will attest – competition for top talent has never been as fierce as it is now. Thinking creatively, which was once the domain of artists and a narrow group of people working in the movie, music and advertising business, has now moved mainstream. Books like The Rise of the Creative Class and War for Talent have looked at the need to find, train and retain the best. The Organic blog has an interesting post on how cities, like Toronto, are finding ways to grow, nurture and retain talented people. The five steps outlined at the Imagine Toronto Case Study are: Grow your own, recognise the leaders in the local, use the underground community, use the bullpen, be aware of the domino effect. Details on the Organic Blog.

Print Media Evolves

The Economist is launching an online audio version of every issue of the magazine, to meet the needs of subscribers with no time to read. The weekly said it was the first leading international publication to offer a full audio edition. From this week, listeners will be able to scroll through the Economist and download audio versions of articles by section or in its entirety. The audio project follows the magazine’s “This week in the Economist,”  with a five-minute podcast of selected stories available on Economist.com and at Apple’s iTunes store. A lot of print titles are experimenting with new media tools like audio, video and blog versions of their existing editions. Many mainline publications are available on iTunes. Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher have an online-only news magazine AllThingsD. At The Times, tech journalist David Pogue does video. See him here in a musical praising the iPhone.

CMOs RIP

A study to be published in the Journal of Marketing that covered 167 companies including Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and Apple over a five-year period concludes that CMOs on top management teams don’t have any effect on a company’s financial performance. ‘Chief Marketing Officers: A Study of their Presence in Firms’ Top Management Teams,’ is sure to reignite the longstanding debate afflicting the C suite: Should a CMO be judged on tangible or intangible metrics? On solid stats such as sales, or on more amorphous concepts such as brand equity or even awareness? The authors themselves admit the study is limited because it focuses on financial-performance metrics, such as sales growth and profitability, and not brand equity, and both were quick to offer caveats to the conclusion. Providing a counter view to the study is a presentation by Raj Srivastava, executive director at the Zyman Institute of Brand Science. He points out that the market value of an average company is about four times its book value. A few companies, like Coca-Cola deviate from this rule. Coke has a market value seven times higher than what the accountants think the company is worth. So where does that intangible value come from? Brands, he believes add value well beyond the short-term growth in revenue. They help to reduce volatility for established goods and services by reducing churn, increasing a company’s leverage with retailers and resellers, and ensuring faster market penetration. Read more from the Millward Brown Blog.

Ebay 2.0

Under pressure from analysts and investors to jump-start growth in its core auctions business, eBay is making a series of upgrades intended to make the site more friendly to buyers. eBay hasn’t changed much since its founding in 1995. You could go to the site looking for Star Wars items and get a thousand results all sorted by what auction is closing first, even if you are you looking for a Star Wars pendant, poster, or a DVD; it doesn’t matter. You’ll see everything. The company is testing simplified layouts that are less likely to confuse shoppers than the old version, which analysts said was among the most cluttered in the e-commerce industry. eBay is also testing new ways to deliver search results. Instead of heading each list of results with items whose auctions are about to expire, the company will, in the coming months give users the option of seeing search results headed by items the company predicts will be most appealing to buyers. Read more.

Bank 2027

Not everyone is brave enough to look 20 years ahead from now. But when you are The Bankwatch, you probably can see a bit further than most. So taking off from the current social networking trend Colin gives us a peek into what the bank of the future could look like. He starts with an interesting hypothesis, that banks have to understand that a customer has many lives, and hence could look for solutions to suit these many avatars. Just like with social networks, where there are spaces with broad appeal like Orkut, MySpace or FaceBook, there are other verticals with common interest appeal: Nike+ that appeals to runners, or SneakerPlay for those into the sneaker culture. The real point with the next evolution of social networks are that they let users bring in different components into their pages. So could it be that consumers can aggregate bits of stuff they want onto this page and run their lives from here.There are a lot of ideas on this post that point us to a different kind of banking experience, specially in a scenario where most of the world won’t need the reassurance of visiting physical branches anymore. Read more at The Bankwatch.