Telecom Italia?s unrealized potential

The Wall Street Journal Europe
26 Sep 2008

There is little doubt that debt-laden Telecom Italia has the greatest turnaround potential among European telecom companies, but the jury?s still out on whether current management has the mettle to realize it. The former national monopoly says it will…read more…

Can we ever trust free markets again?
Peter L. Bernstein
International Herald Tribune
27 Sep 2008

The Paulson-Bernanke bailout plan shines a blinding searchlight on the detritus in the American financial system. Assets are evidently rotten in so many different places that no financial institution wants to risk doing business with any other…read more…

REUTERS.

Visa plans to offer services to phones powered by Google’s Android including alerts when your credit card has been used.

The credit card network also said next month, No. 1 mobile phone maker Nokia would start selling the 6212 phone, which users could wave at an electronic reader to make payments and use for remote payments and money transfers.

Visa said it was still developing its application to allow in- store “ contactless” payments by cell phone for Android.

But it said these services – already common in countries such as Japan – may not take off for years here as US stores would need to install new card readers and cell phones with the corresponding technology would need to be in wider use.

In the meantime, Visa said that it would offer transaction alerts and discount offers from merchants to Android users. The application will also work with Google maps and location technology to help users find nearby cash machines and stores where special offers are available.

Visa said that for the first few months, the application will be available to Android phone users who also have Visa cards issued by JPMorgan Chase banks. It plans to open the application to other banks next year.

Earlier thisweek, Googleunveiled the first Android- powered phone, which HTC Corp. is making and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile unit is selling.

Butthe initialAndroiddevicedoes not include hardware to support contactless credit card payments.

TimAttinger, Visa’s globalheadof product development, said that while mobilepaymentserviceshave been slow to take off, the company sees mobilephonesas key to adding newcustomers. Only1.6 billion Visa cards are in use today, compared with more than three billion people with cell phones.

“ We’re absolutely going to start porting financial services into those,” MrAttinger said.

Times Colonist, Canada. 27-9-2008

GILLIAN SHAW

“Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me,” won’t work any more when a colleague is looking for the money you borrowed to buy lunch or the babysitter needs paying.

That’s thanks to a new mobile payment system by RBC Royal Bank that lets users text money from their mobile phones. Already, more than 1,100 people have signed up for the RBC Mobex mobile payment service, which was launched last Tuesday for a trial run that wraps up in January with a consumer pilot program yet to be announced.

In another technological advance in the works, RBC is lab-testing a system that would let users pay by waving their cellphones at the checkout instead of using a Visa credit card for small purchases.

The Mobex mobile payment service “is geared to substitute for cashing cheques between people,” said Anne Koski, head of RBC Payments Innovation. “There is no application at a merchant and the maximum load on any given day is $100, with a maximum of $500 a month.

“We are really thinking these are going to be the $20and-under transactions. We are thinking about paying your babysitter, settling up for lunch. The one I think I’ll use all the time is when somebody at work is having a baby or going away, rather than having an envelope going around the office for a collection, you can say, ‘I’ll send you my contribution.’”

Koski said the Mobex trial will help the bank understand how people use the service and provide it with input for potential changes and improvements.

No date has been set for a consumer rollout. “We want to understand how people use it, do people use it differently, do they think about it differently,” she said. “That is part of what we want to learn from all of this.”

Up to $100 a day can be sent to mobile phone users who have text messaging (SMS) capability on their phones with any Canadian wireless carrier, with the money being funded from a Mobex account that users link to their regular bank accounts or to a credit card.

If a bank account is used to fund Mobex, the money must be transferred first to cover any transactions, but Koski said if the funding source is a credit card, users won’t have to keep a balance in their Mobex accounts because the money will be covered directly from the credit card.

To send money, payers send a text message to RBC Mobex with the dollar amount of the payment and the payee’s cellphone number. Funds are shifted from the sender’s Mobex account and the recipient gets a cellphone text message to signal the money has been sent.

To get the money, recipients must register for the payment service by enrolling for the RBC Mobex account through the RBC Mobex website.

Recipients don’t have to be enrolled in online banking to participate. Money can be loaded to the Mobex account through the RBC Mobex website (at rbcmobex.com) from accounts at any financial institution in Canada or through a credit card.

Koski said the new payment system uses the same secure payment systems used by Canadian banks. For additional security when someone sends more than $25 from a mobile phone, he or she receives a call to verify the transaction with a personal identification number.

Users can track their RBC Mobex accounts from their mobile phone or through the RBC Mobex website, checking balances, payment history and topping up the account. There are no added fees for the trial service, outside of regular bank or wireless carrier charges.

The cellphone test to replace a credit card at checkout counters uses mobile phones embedded with Near Field Communication contactless chips that let users pay by waving their phones at a Visa payWave checkout.