Well, it’s that time of year again. Yes, despite there being at least another two months left to go until Christmas, the TV festive advertisements have begun in earnest. And there’s nothing we can do about it! Often with the contrived voiceover of a Z-list celebrity, these adverts attempt to persuade millions of us to…

Sir David Walker, new chairman of Barclays, doused himself with controversy last week, by suggesting that the recent bank mis-selling scandals might have been avoided if bank accounts charged a fee. Quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, Sir David said that “[b]ecause banks are not charging, it drives them inexorably into this sort of position”. “Inexorably”…

As the Libor rate rigging scandal unfolds, what’s clear is that it has taken a crisis of this magnitude for many to understand and appreciate the significance of this global benchmark. But what is Libor? Financial institutions across the world use Libor when transacting with each other – Reuters estimates that £230 trillion worth of…

A few years back I accompanied a colleague on a novel lunchtime excursion. It was something I had never witnessed before, it was exciting, and it felt very wrong… He was switching his current account. Back then I had never heard of this, let alone witnessed it – what a buzz! The reason? It wasn’t…

Wave-and-go smartphone technology – a contactless payment system where you wave your phone over a reader and it takes the payment – is yet to become a mainstream, or even usable, form of payment in the UK. Yet in Japan the technology has been in use for six years, with over 70 million users. A…