What a Lazy Blogger. No I'm not Dead, Just Living in West Yorkshire

It’s been a few months since my last MWOP posting, and my boss is nagging me to update the blog.  Anyone would think I had nothing better to do all day, and hadn’t been working like a slave to set up a certain new blog site called The Banking Reform Bulletin

You know me: ever conscientious, industrious and eager to please.  So I have spent the entire morning catching up with current events in the world of credit systems and lending. It is January after all; still early days of the New Year, and it feels like a good time for a catch-up and a special bumper edition of My World of Plastic.

Here’s a quick round-up of what I found:-

The slow death of the cheque grinds on.

According to the UK Payments Council, most of us didn’t even notice that the old the cheque guarantee card system had been abolished. Thousands of consumers, especially the elderly, and including charitable institutions (see my earlier blog posting, http://charlottemooney.blogspot.com/2011/06/death-of-cheque.html), have been vociferous in their opposition of the banks’ campaign to get rid of the cheque completely.  That didn’t prevent the Payments Council from closing the cheque card guarantee system on June 30 2011. Their market research (published in December 2011, Cheque Guarantee Card Scheme, Research to assess the impact of closure), concludes that the abolition of the system had little or no impact on businesses and consumers.  According to

Adrian Kamellard, Chief Executive of the Payments Council:

“We’ve committed that cheques are here to stay, so we were pleased that the demise of the guaranteed cheque has had little impact on the way people use cheques, nor has it stopped businesses accepting them

What with the Euro Zone Crisis and the continuing financial downturn worldwide, it’s a gloomy picture, but that didn’t stop Christmas 2011 from happening.

What’s Christmas all about? Yep, you got it, it’s all about the presents.  And guess what?  We used more cash than ever before. UK bank customers withdrew record amounts from ATM machines over the Christmas holidays, according to Link, who network of cash machines accounts for 70% of the UK ATM market.  It could be a sign of a trend that British shoppers are relying more on cash than credit and debit cards to make in-store purchases. Ron Delnevo, MD of Bank Machine and a Director of the Payments Council, said:

"It is wonderful to see the UK Public increasingly using cash as their "safe haven" spending preference. People are heartily tired of rip off cards with high RPR and other charges. Christmas Eve’samazing cash spending spree will vividly underline this".

Richard Branson’s Virgin Money has taken over Northern Rock

Good news for the North of England, with news that Virgin Money are to move their base to Newcastle, HQ of the old Northern Rock.  They have also pledged that there will be no compulsory redundancies at the Rock for the next 3 years. Northern Rock was nationalised in 2008, following the subprime mortgage crisis and the historic ‘run on the bank’ which followed.  The British government are now hoping that the re-branded bank will provide serious competition serious competitor to the "big four" banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Lenders are falling over each other to attract new customer & keep the old ones

 You can’t help but notice all the tempting special offers around at the moment, on current accounts as well as on plastic.  Switch to a Halifax Ultimate Reward current Account for £100 incentive, or get up to £300 reward by switching to a Santander account.  But the most alluring offer of them all?  It has to be the cuddly meerkat toy, available to all customers who successfully apply for a credit card or loan through the Comparethemarket.com website. So successful has their popular  comparethemeerkat advertising campaign been that  demand for the free cuddly toy has now reached 30 applications per second!

History of Banking in photographs.

As you know I love a bit of banking history and nostalgia.  I found these great images on the Daily Telegraph website.

http://tinyurl.com/bankhistory

A belated Happy New Year to all MWOP followers, regular readers and casual visitors.

Stop by again soon!