Financial Safety Advice

U.S. chain Borders bookstores, which forced many small businesses in the industry to close its doors, introduced on Wednesday a request for federal bankruptcy protection, lost by a crushing debt and slow to adapt to a business sector in flux .

40 years the company plans to close about 200 of its 642 branches over the next two weeks. All stores will close will be of great dimension, said Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis. The company also operates Waldenbooks stores and Borders Express, both smaller format.

Borders ran out of capital resources

Mike Edwards, president of Borders Group Inc., said in a brief statement that the cautious customer spending, negotiations with publishers and other vendors and a lack of liquidity made it clear that Borders does not have the capital resources need to be a viable competitor. “

Borders said it plans to operate normally and respect the gift cards and loyal customer programs while it reorganizes.

$ 1.290 billion in debts

The company will receive $ 500 million in financing from GE Capital and others to help with the reorganization. Borders said in January that included filing for bankruptcy after receiving a conditional loan of $ 500 million of GE Capital that required securing alternative funding. Read the rest of this entry →

The significant changes in the industry, the economic volatility, changes in client expectations and adoption of new technology has increased the challenges for the various financial industries. Alejandro Amicone, a partner at Accentual and responsible for the financial services industry in Argentina, drew up a report that highlights the main trends for the coming years.

Research says, suggest that we are at a point where the business capabilities can be essentially elastic, flexible and able to accommodate any level of economic volatility, and catapult an organization with unprecedented levels of performance. Beyond that elasticity can be seen 4 major technological trends: Data and Decisions, Mobility, Convergence of collaboration, communication, community and Internet Content.

Data and Decisions

Over the next three to five years banks have significantly better data available even with the footprint of customers, which will streamline the sales and trading services. At the same time, the data and decision tools will allow a breakthrough in supporting information when making decisions between bank clients and prospects. Guests will have the correct information about products, services and accounts when needed and can be accessed through multiple channels. Read the rest of this entry →

One of the issues currently of greatest impact is the economic crisis that is facing worldwide. Situation that we are suffering not only us as individuals but also various industries such as financial industry, automotive and insurance company AIG. The crisis in the auto industry goes hand in hand with the financial industry since by reducing vehicle demand, in turn decreases the chance of financing banks.

All this economic crisis is forcing financial institutions to offer customers various options to achieve sales and maintain existing ones. Such as lower interest rates, flexible credit evaluation, offering holidays to personal and car loans in arrears, mortgage loan modifications and other alternatives provided by the federal government to help consumers keep their property but in turn decreases the financial industry profits are forced to lower the percent of interest. The products of greatest demand and generate more profits for the financial industries were Real Estate, Mortgages, Read the rest of this entry →

70% of the population of Brazil, Russia, India and China have no bank account. But how many have cell phones (it is estimated that there are nearly one billion people in all emerging markets)? That’s why investors put eyes on mobile payments. Last week, Actis bought chipmaker MSCC egipicia to dig deep in the activity.

Arthur D. Little predicts that the mobile payments market will be worth 60,000 million for 2015. Anticipates that within five years, the number of people who serve the mobile banking will rise from 32 million today to 290 million. That means there will be more than a million new users per week.

Ambitious goal, no doubt, but mobile payments are a solid foundation.
First, as suggested above, this should allow banks to reach new consumers. The insertion of mobile phones is improving access in Mexico and emerging countries. Thus it is possible that nearly 40% of the population has telephones, but still without access to the bank.

Second, banks can expand very economically. As noted by the FT editor, Sharlene Goff, a few weeks ago, banks can reduce up to 50% of their costs if [for their operations] are based on devices, rather than branches. Read the rest of this entry →