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Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

ANZ and Visa lose the plot

In one of the more witless examples of PR buffoonery ever witnessed at Finextra Towers (and that's saying something), Visa and ANZ have been moved to quell reports that their recent trial of Device Fidelity's MicroSD-based m-payments technology was anything other than a spectacular success. Bearing the headline 'ANZ-Visa mobile phone payment pilo...

/retail

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Don't give up the day job...ever

Just stumbled across this jaw-dropping anecdote from a NY Times article on the May 6 Flash crash: The founder of Tradebot, in Kansas City, Mo., told students in 2008 that his firm typically held stocks for 11 seconds. Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said. Tradebot, incidentall...

/wholesale Whatever...

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Now we are ten

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that Finextra's sporting a proud new logo. That's right. we're celebrating our tenth birthday later this year and we thought we'd mark the occasion by commissioning a special commemorative logo. Truth be told, Finextra's tenth anniversary goes back a little further than 2010. About eighteen months earlier t...

/retail /wholesale

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Finextra's Best of the Web

Good news for all you news junkies out there. Finextra has introduced a new 'Best of the Web' news feed to sit alongside our regular output of breaking stories from the world of fintech. Much like our Best of the Web blog feed in the Community section (which aggregates content from 21 leading third party blogs), the new service tracks interesting ...

/retail /wholesale

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

The ATM was the last great financial innovation

How do you define innovation in finance? Are we talking about the creation of new synthetic debt instruments, famously decried by Warren Buffet as "financial weapons of mass destruction". Or should we be looking at tech or service-led innovations that have contributed to the social good. The reason I ask is because MIT has just published ...

/retail /wholesale Finance 2.0

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Finra's social media mash up

Lots of chatter in social media circles yesterday about this report on the New Comm Biz blog cocerning a financial services employee who was allegedly forced to remove his LinkedIn profile in response to Finra's recent Web 2.0 guidance note. "I received a disturbing email from a friend of mine," the post begins. "I have changed the ...

/wholesale Finance 2.0

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Tokyo fires blunt arrowhead

The Tokyo Stock Exchange has spent $140 million on the development of arrowhead, a new 'super-fast' trading platform that processes trades in five milliseconds, approximately 600 times faster than its legacy predecessor. The TSE may have hauled itself into the 21st century with the upgrade, but it already appears to have been left in the starting b...

/wholesale

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Goldman bankers tool up with handguns - allegedly

We hear from no less a source than a Bloomberg news columnist that the higher-ups at Goldman Sachs are loading up on pistol permits for fear of a popular uprising against God's own bankers. Now, the 'evidence' for this is anecdotal in the extreme. “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the goo...

/wholesale Whatever...

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Message to BofA: If you want Clarity try YouTube

Bank of America has announced the launch of the Credit Card Clarity Commitment(TM), a one-page summary of customers' rates, fees, and payment information. "Bank of America is investing more in our customers and our future," says Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America Consumer, Small Business Banking, and Card Services president. "We are ...

/payments /retail Finance 2.0

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Thomson Reuters logo goes down the pan

Credit to Reuters' blogger Felix Salmon for picking this one up from the Post Secrets blog. The secret story of Thomson Reuters new logo, as told by a disaffected design team member:

/wholesale Whatever...

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