Comments
It is similar to peer to peer lending with one difference Gonzalo. On other P2P lending sites, you are given a general idea about the individual your are investing in but you do not know specifically who he or she is. With the Cogster model, you actually know the exact location of where you are investing in and your returns are basically store credits with that individual. This is more of a community investment tool than a traditional peer to peer lending environment like Prosper or Lending Club. Thanks for the comment.
Aaron,
How about using the screen of the phone for bar codes? That does not require new hardware outside of a bar code gun which many merchants already have. Similiar to the airline industry - that might be a way to go as well.
Scott - I think that your simple SaaS definition is accurate "To me, there are at least two minimal conditions necessary to be considered 'cloud computing'. First, the application must be accessed via the public Internet. Second, the application must be hosted is in a shared datacenter environment and available for multiple clients (even if each instance is sandboxed). Most, including myself, would consider those two minimal conditions to be the simple definition of a SaaS product."
Hence, some banking applications - including Online Banking and Bill Pay - are technically some of the first cloud computing processes offered by the banking community. I am curious as to how mobile fits in? Are the mobile networks considered public or private? If one argues that the mobile networks are private - then access to cloud based applications would not be possible (or at least it would not be called a cloud). Might be semantics, but curious to see how people feel private networks like mobile will either help or hinder the cloud.
Somebody wrote me with the following.."
What do you do with the check after it's scanned? File it away or shred it?"That is a great question, and one of the main reasons why there needs to be serious consideration around who banks and credit unions extend this technology too. My wife immediately said, gee, couldn't you just deposit that check again somewhere else? My answer of course was sure, if you want me to commit check fraud and end up in jail. I personally have held that check for now, but will shred it probably after a few days. One could though inadvertantly try to redeposit the check - so again this is technology that needs to be carefully weighed before deploying.
CK - it must be a day of firsts for me as I just deposited cash into an envelope free ATM. My first interactions with the ATM I too would not deposit checks, but today I caved. I had never deposited cash until just now - recognizing that "empty envelope" transactions can not happen when there are no envelopes, so I have technology on my side.
NOTE THIS IS FROM AN ORIGIANL POST BACK IN MAY....but with a Colonial BancGroup now on the radar for failure, how much more can the FDIC take in hits to the fund? IDC Financial Insights has been tracking the estimated hit to the fund, and with 2009 bank failures costing the FDIC close to $15B, there is just a razor thin balance left. Can a $25B bank be too big to fail because it will deplete the insurance fund?
More gold...we can't make these stories up. At a SECURITY conference in Vegas, attendees uncovered a fake ATM in a hotel lobby. But at least 8,000 people had tried it first.
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=20333
Maybe security enhancements for ATMs is a priority.
The bad guys exploting Reg E and ATM's to the tune of almost a half a million dollars in New York. Tough times call for extreme measures.
Gomathy,
Some of this is addressed in the white paper we did with Adobe. Our survey did not go into the specific pain points around the onboarding process, but from what we have heard it is primarily on the length of time and data required by banks to open new accounts. The banks that were surveyed were not published, but I can tell you that we had a great mix of Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions globally, with the bulk being regional (Tier 2) banks.
Good point Chris. I believe since so many have opted to supress receipt printing that marketing on the receipt is probably not a great way to go, especially since people are trying to safeguard all personal information and are unlikely to use their receipt as a coupon for example. On the screen marketing is fine as long as it does not delay the process. People want fast transactions and not commercials when at the ATM.
