Foreign Perspectives

Archive for May, 2007

Barclays Bank bought the Woolwich Building Society around seven years ago but really did very little to integrate the two outfits until now. In fact, the only visible changes to date is that the Woolwich stopped issuing credit cards under its own name and various documents started having “a trading name of Barclays Bank” or words to that effect added to them.

The original reason put forward for their purchase was to acquire the technology that Woolwich used to implement its excellent Open Plan account, an account that let you offset any savings that you have against your mortgage. Not really a great move on the whole as the Woolwich technology was extremely primitive even then and, though operational, did silly things like charge you interest when you wrote a cheque against money that you actually had in a linked savings account and then refunding that the following month.

In due course, Barclays ran up a version for themselves and improved the offering from the Woolwich.

However, now they’re finally getting around to fully integrating the Woolwich into Barclays so all existing Woolwich accounts will disappear and be replaced by the corresponding Barclays ones. Snag is, that the Woolwich offered a number of quite sophisticated savings accounts and Barclays only has very simple ones.

Naturally, Barclays is putting this across as a series of “improvements”. They list 10, so let’s look at each one:

1. You’ll have over 30,000 staff waiting to help you including many who are presently serving customers in the Woolwich.

So, you’ll have Barclays staff to look to. OK, more people, so let’s count that as a real improvement 

2. You can use any of the 1,700 or so Barclays branches in the country and any Barclays Hole in the Wall„¢ machines.

Em, you already can so that’s hardly an improvement.

3. You’ll have access to Barclays telephone and online banking*, so it’s easy to manage your money when our branches are closed.

Woolwich already have phone and online banking, so that’s not an improvement.

4. You can get the same tailored service you expect from your Woolwich branch, only more so you can book an appointment with one of our Personal Bankers. And our specialists will help to make sure that all your financial needs are covered.

Actually, you’ve been able to do that for around seven years now.

5. You can choose anything from a wide range of Barclays products and specialist services.

You’ve always been able to do that.

6. You can also arrange your foreign currency and International Money Orders at any Barclays branch, at our Bureaux de Change or by calling the Barclays Travel Line on 0845 600 8090**.

You’ve always been able to do that, though hardly a recommendation given their charges.

7. You will also have peace of mind of knowing that your money remains safe with us. For instance, we offer free security software to active online customers€ .

OK, we’ll give them that one.

8. Barclays has a broader range of products and services so we can help you with your business finances as well as your personal ones.

Actually, it offers a narrower range of products though it does do business finance so let’s count that as a plus.

9. We also do more in the community. Spaces for Sports is just one example we’re investing over £30 million in helping communities to transform their sporting facilities in the UK.

Well, if memory serves, the Woolwich was pretty active in supporting local communities before it was taken over.

10. The same friendly staff will be there, helping us to stay one of the top 20 big companies in Britain to work for.

So, no change is counted as an advantage of the change?

However, what about the accounts that are changing. In fact, almost every single one is being downgraded.

Cardsaver

A very popular account which offers a Visa Electron debit card and pays quite good interest.

This becomes a savings account which offers (on request) a card which will only work in Barclays machines in the UK. Moreover, it will no longer be possible to get counter cheques so if you want to withdraw more than the cash machine limit (reduced from £400 to £300), you’ll need to open a Barclays current account. Oh, and you can’t make deposits in the ATMs any more.

So, this account has been “improved” by removing nearly all the facilities from it for which people selected it.

Open Plan for Savers

I suspect that the Barclays people have completely forgotten about this account.

This was even better in some ways as the Cardsaver account. It gave you on a savings account, a chequebook and full Visa debit card plus the ability to setup up to 12 separate savings accounts within it, each of which could have individual standing orders and direct debits against them.

This becomes a standard savings account which offers (on request) a cash card which will only work in Barclays machines and, again, a reduced limit of £300 per day. Of course, you can’t make deposits in the ATMs either.

If I’m right that they have forgotten about this account, it will cause chaos for those people who have it. All of a sudden their direct debits won’t get paid for a start. If they have remembered about it, I’d say that it could be rather a difficult account to map onto the Barclays range as it offers the equivalent to having up to 12 separate current accounts.

Almost all of the downsides arise from the fact that Woolwich was basically a savings institution when it was taken over whereas Barclays is a commercial bank. The effect of this is that the Woolwich had a much more sophisticated range of savings accounts and it would have been far simpler had Barclays adopted these rather than downgrading the accounts across the board.

After all, when the Halifax bought the Bank of Scotland, the accounts available to everyone in both institutions really did improve. But then, the Halifax was the savings institution and well aware that peoples’ savings needs aren’t met well by the offerings of banks. The Halifax/Bank of Scotland now offers everything that was on offer by both parties and indeed many products have been significantly improved by the takeover.

Barclays is in the process of taking a great step backwards in its offerings.

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Almost all of the press coverage that you see is of the view that global warming is a “bad thing” and we should be getting the finger out to stop it happening. But, is it?

This is a painting by Hondius in 1684 of one of the regular Frost Fairs taking place on the Thames. In fact both the Thames and the Baltic Sea froze over quite regularly in the 1600s.

That was prior to the industrial revolution of course and combined with a much lower population, pollution at that time was considerably less than it would have been 150 or so years later. The “Black Country” wasn’t named that for nothing as it was filled with major league polluters during the industrial revolution.

Did the industrial revolution stop us getting into another ice age? Nobody can really say as there are just too many variables in the equation: you’ve everything from the industrial revolution raising pollution levels considerably to sunspot cycles and to top it all the records over the period simply weren’t accurate or complete enough to really give a definitive answer.

What if the alternative to global warming were global cooling? Would that be a “good thing”?

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Thanks to Panthère rose for bringing a report highlighting the French as a bunch of whiners this morning.Why is that though? Well, simply put: because it’s an industrial relations tactic that always works in France.

There are untold numbers of examples of the government caving in to demands that one law or another should be dropped because it just didn’t suit some aspect of the population to have it implemented. Two particular sections of the population really stand out in this regard though: students and farmers.

Last year we had riots going on for months because the student population didn’t want a law passed that would, at a stroke, make it both easier to hire and to fire them. It would have led to a drastic reduction in youth unemployment because, at the moment, once you employ someone, that’s it, it’s pretty much permanent. Net effect of the current situation is that companies employ less people than they actually need which, of course, reduces the satisfaction levels of their customers somewhat.

There are just too many examples of the farmers taking to the streets to list them here but the one strand that they have in common is that the farmers want people to buy only French produce and to pay more for it. Hence, when there’s even the mildest of problems with any agricultural product from overseas, their first reaction is to insist on it being banned from France.

The demonstrations against Sarkozy have, of course, already started as he has a whole range of policies designed to drag French working practices and competitiveness into the 21st century. The changes are necessary but they’re going to be difficult for France to accept. After all, look at the problems that we had in the UK when Margaret Thatcher came to power.

So, yes, you could consider them as a bunch of whiners. After all, wouldn’t you be too if it worked every time?

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Normally the French beach resorts basically close in mid-September and don’t fully reopen until the following June but the season has been expanding in recent years.

When we went out to Canet Plage yesterday we were pleasantly surprised to find just about everything had been opened up. In fact, the resort was even more lively than it usually is most of the Summer season courtesy of a two day kite surfing run by the Canet Plage kite surfing club.

It remains a different story during the week though as most things can be expected to be closed, with the possible exception of the coming week which is a major holiday in France.

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

This little link train is perhaps one of the most interesting that I’ve come across to date. Kelly Cho just tagged me this morning and I’ll follow their example in tagging several blogs outside the usual link trains to see the effect.

~Start Copying Here~

Alexa Redirect Train by Carl Ocab

Rules:

• Put anything you like above this list Chit Chat, talkies, introduce what this is.
• Start copying on the ~Start Copying Here~’ and copy all the things listed without removing the links (Of course, the train would be no use without those links)
• Move all the sites labeled Newcomers’ to the list labeled Oldies’.
• Add 5 sites that you want to include in the train and make their Visit My Site’ link like this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.kellycho.com then invite them to join the train.
• Visit all the listed sites using the Visit My Site link. (That’s not much work! Remember, if you plant good seeds they will also grow good) and look at your high Alexa ranking next week!

Newcomers:

An Age of Magic – Visit My Site
Off the Vine – Visit My Site
Europe a la Carte – Visit My Site
An Island Life – Visit My Site
Frenchless in France – Visit My Site
Anitokid – Visit My Site Link train

Oldies:

Foreign Perspectives – Visit My Site
Carl Pei – Visit My Site
Swapw – Visit My Site
Life of a School Bus Driver – Visit My Site
Tamiki – Visit My Site
Bobs’ Reformat This – Visit My Site
Shawn Knight – Visit My Site
Kelly Cho – Visit My Site
John Chow dot com – Visit My Site
DoshDosh.com – Visit My Site
Jane May Blogs – Visit My Site
Ms. Danielle – Visit My Site
Stock Trading 101 – Visit My Site
Ed Lau – Visit My Site
Derrich.com – Visit My Site
Nate Whitehill – Visit My Site
Gary Lee – Visit My Site
Make Money Online with a 13-year Old – Visit My Site

~End Copying Here~

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.