Bob Williams

Using online banking to beat phishing

August 13th, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

Phishing and spear phishing attacks do more than increase fraud. The fall-out of criminals impersonating sites that don’t belong to them to trick people into giving their personal information goes beyond fraud and identify theft statistics. Similar to terrorist attacks, it changes the processes and procedures that law abiding citizens go through to transact normal business. Basically, it changes our daily routines because the average Joe has to go through and think about extra stuff to be security conscious. One example is that consumer advocates and the media coach consumers not to open emails that ask for personal information or to update their account.

So how do you deliver messages …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Customer loyalty for banks and credits unions

April 22nd, 2011 | 2 comments | Tags: , ,

Customer loyalty can’t be talk about enough in the market place. I read an article on BankTech.com by Matt Gunn entitled 5 Things Everyone in Banking is Talking About. Matt discusses “Loyalty/Stickiness” as one of his five banking topics of the day. Reality is that customer loyalty is always a topic of concern for businesses despite their industry. But I think Matt’s point is about the urgency of loyalty at this time. New financial regulations are impacting fee income for financial institutions which is resulting in dramatic shifts in standard bank offerings.

Customer loyalty is made from customer focus. The articled triggered a thought about an blog post that’s been on …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

A case for customer focus in the midst of financial regulation

April 3rd, 2011 | 2 comments | Tags: , , , ,

 

Banks are reacting to loss of fee income by creating new fees and dropping services.

Financial institutions across the country are reacting to the impact of Regulation E changes and the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act. The Regulation E changes of 2010 prohibit financial institutions from charging consumers fees for overdrafts on ATM and debit card transactions unless the consumer consents to be charged a fee.  The Durbin Amendment states that interchange fees for debit card transactions must be “reasonable and proportionate” to the actual processing costs incurred by the issuer.  The proposed interchange fee cap is 12 cents per transaction, well below today’s average of 44 cents per …Continue reading >>