Foreign Perspectives

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Woolwich changes into Barclays: the “improvements”

May 17th, 2007 |

Author: Arnold

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.

Peculiariaties of French medicine

May 9th, 2007 |

Author: Arnold

Doctor Bobo
You might think that medical treatment in France would be pretty much the same as it is elsewhere in the world once you get to the point of visiting the doctor, but it isn’t.

Certainly there are the obvious differences in how the various healthcare schemes are run. So, in the UK everything is free but there are waiting lists. In France, everything costs but there aren’t any waiting lists.

Expectations of the patients are quite different too. For example, because the French like to come away from the doctor with something after their visit, the number of medicines prescribed is massive. James had bronchitus last year and in the UK he’d have had a single bottle of medicine yet in France he ended up with that bottle plus tablets plus an inhaler plus appointments at the physiotherapist. Did he get better faster though? Well, no, so there wasn’t really any point in all the additional treatments.

The doctors have no consideration of any modesty that you might have either so almost always it’s “strip off, yes, everything” which is something to bear in mind. Such differences have resulted in there being training sessions for doctors in areas with a high brit expat population.

I wonder though if Doctor Bobo realises that his potential brit clientele is a good deal smaller than it might be if he didn’t advertise himself as a clown?

The BlogCatalog My Neighbourhood Train

May 8th, 2007 |

Author: Arnold

Assorted link trains seem to be the flavour of the season from the original Technorati Favourites Exchange (still plugging a way a month down the line), to the MyBlogLog train (on a slower line) and now we have the BlogCatalog My Neighbourhood train which I came across at SYAF the Geek just yesterday.

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.

2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.

3) Take My New Neighborhoods Members’ and move them into the The Original Neighborhoods Members’ list.

4) Find 3 new blogs, join their Blogcatalog Neighborhoods and add them to the My New Neighborhoods Members’ section. Remember to also add the Join this Neighborhood’ link next to your new blogs. ( Example: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/syaf-the-geek.html )

5) Join as a member to each Neighborhoods listed here by clicking on Join this Neighborhood’. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your neighborhood, and you should do the same!

My New Neighborhoods Members

My Boots n Me Join This Neighborhood

Reduce to Silence Join This Neighborhood

Viking Princess Join This Neighborhood

Master Cleanse Join This Neighborhood

The originals

***End Copying Here***

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for dummies; Techie blog reviews

May 5th, 2007 |

Author: Arnold

As ‘yall know, I’ve been one of the participants of the Technorati Favourites Exchange (TFX) over the last few weeks which had the aim of getting a whole bunch of people into the top 100 favourited blogs list on Technorati. It’s been very successful too with the composition of that top 100 changing entirely.

So far, I’ve not yet made it as the barrier seems to move up every time I think I’m about to get in at number 100 but I’m not really that bothered as I’ve learnt far more over the last couple of weeks about promoting FP than I would otherwise have done in months if not years. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of that with you here.

First off, it’s very clear that the way to go with the adsense ads is the big square block that you see on FP these days. That’s the one that all the big money making blogs use and when we talk big money, one clocked up $8500 in March.

Getting the traffic up is key to that $8500 of course and with that in mind I’m pleased to see that the link exchanges that are part and parcel of the TFX have moved me into the top 40k of blogs with well over 100 incoming links to date. If you get the chance, it’s definitely worthwhile participating in one of the many link trains around.

What’s also quite useful in increasing the income from the blog/website is to improve the ranking of Alexa and Google. Now, google is staffed with some smart cookies so it’s not too easy to outsmart them and, by and large, what you need to do is to bump up the number of incoming links over a period of time. Naturally that means that your Google ranking isn’t going to go from zero to seven in a couple of months and indeed it’s taken me about eight months to get to PR4 with FP and, all being well, it’ll be at PR5 or perhaps PR6 at the next review (due around July).

However, Alexa is a completely different story. What’s clear is that being in the top 100k sites in Alexa brings in significant cash benefits in that people are prepared to pay more for links from such a site, for you to write articles about them, etc. if you’re in that top 100k. The Alexa people seem to be a completely dumber bunch than those at Google (sorry guys, but it looks like that from here) though and it seems to sufficient merely to download the Alexa toolbar and just look at your own site. Doing that has knocked off 100k from my ranking in a matter of days and I’m not even milking it by just sitting and hitting refresh either. Will it be possible to get into the top 100k doing that though? I think it will as friends of ours with a broadly similar “real” readership are bouncing along at around 100k yet with the location of the readership obviously completely squewed by them accessing their own pages.

What’s also clear is that there’s a whole lot of people out there who think that throwing together a blog is a doddle as everything is totally automated. Well, not quite everything is automated and I’ve picked up loads of great ideas from looking at the various blogs participating in the TFX which I’m gradually incorporating into FP.

If anyone’s interested, I can do a little technical review of their site and point out the various things that they could usefully do to get the traffic up. All I’m asking for the moment is that you do a little article mentioning Foreign Perspectives on your own blog. I’ll consider reviewing non-blog sites too but that would be a chargeable thing.

The RSS Link Train

May 4th, 2007 |

Author: Arnold

Thanks to Nia for putting me on to Bob’s new Feed My Feed game, this will help increase the estimated RSS feed on ReviewMe.com.

So here is how the game is played:

The Feed Link Chain is a blog Link game that is gaining in popularity within the blogosphere. Unlike other blog games which focused on getting backlinks, this one is going to help you increase your Feed Readers.

All you have to do is

(1) Add your name and the feed link to the chain along with the names and feeds of three blogs that you would like to include.

(2) Simply publish the new list to your blog and allow your readers to participate in the game by continuing the chain!

(3) Link back to me in your post and make a comment HERE with the three sites you’ve added; I’ll add them to the list on my site so that others, when copying the list from my site will be propagating your three as well!

All the blogs mentioned in the chain are worth reading so do add them to your feeds and spread the word around.

Visit Feedburner for a URL feed for each site if you don’t already have that.