From today The Royal Bank of Scotland is letting customers withdraw money from a cash machine — using their mobile phone rather than a card.
All you need is the bank’s GetCash app and you can take out up to £100 of your money at a time.
It’s a first for any UK bank and RBS hope the innovation will be the first step towards cardless ATMs.
The 2.4million customers who already have the RBS banking app on their phone will be able to use the GetCash option from today.
They can access their money at 8,000 RBS, NatWest and Tesco ATMs around the country — after requesting and receiving a secret six-digit pin which is only valid for three hours.
The GetCash app can also be used to give money to a friend or relative — by sending a secure text containing a pin.
They can then use this to withdraw money from a participating cash point.
Ben Green, head of mobile at NatWest and RBS, said: “This has never been done anywhere in the UK, and yet it’s a really simple and secure way to help our customers get cash whenever and wherever they need it.
“We’ve heard countless stories from customers who have left their wallet behind or parents who need a quick way to send money to their children immediately.”
NatWest, part of RBS Group, say they are certain the app is not open to abuse by fraudsters.
A spokesman said: “We have spent loads of time making sure the security on this is very, very tight.
“To get on the banking app itself you have to have a six-digit pincode.
“If you put in the pin wrong a number of times it will lock you out. If you don’t use the banking app for a period of time it will time out and can’t be accessed.
“If there are any cases of fraud — just as with going to an ATM if someone gets hold of your card — then we refund.”
The app can be accessed using iPhones and iPads plus Android and BlackBerry smartphones.
It can also be used to check balances, transfer money and to find your nearest ATM.
1. Log on to the RBS banking app using your PIN.
2. Choose the GetCash option. Type in amount you wish to withdraw.
3. You will be sent a unique six-digit pin.
4. Go to one of 8,000 participating cash points.
5. Press “Enter” on ATM.
6. Follow the prompts for “Emergency cash” and enter cash code and the amount you requested.
7. If the details are correct the money will be issued – up to £100 a time.
8. Use GetCash as many times as you want – so long as you don’t go over your daily withdrawal limit.
Think Tank: sport and business are not a good fit - Daily Telegraph
Sport is all about beating someone else. There are no win-win solutions, you can't increase the size of the market in victories and you don't need to watch out for new entrants who play by different rules. The fickle tastes of consumers may determine the size of your sponsorship prize but no amount of clapping and chanting will alter the finish time or final score.
Yes, to be successful in business or sport you need determination, the trust of your colleagues and a good coach, but you need these just as much in ballet.
The thing is that businesses are mainly run by men who enjoy sport. The sporting analogy allows them to indulge their hobby and meet their heroes on the company's time, no matter that they guide us down the wrong fairway.
Whereas most business decisions are guided by facts, when it comes to messages about motivation and leadership, instinct takes over. We go with what we like or what reinforces how we see ourselves rather than what works. And it's not just a question of sport.
It is widely but mistakenly believed that extroverts are more effective leaders than introverts. In fact, as Tom Hinkley at Liberty University demonstrated, there is no correlation between the five qualities of a leader (challenging the process; inspiring a shared vision; enabling others to act; modelling the way forward and encouraging the heart) and extroversion/introversion.
Indeed, there appears to be an inverse correlation between publishing an autobiography and business success. Compare the little-known Ann Mulcahy, who turned around Xerox, with Carly Fiorina, one-time CEO of HP and author of The Fiorina Way, who saw HP's share price go up only on the day she resigned. Lou Gerstner transformed Chrysler but, once he turned into a celebrity CEO, the company's performance plateaued.
Even when achievements are genuine, we run the risk of drawing the wrong conclusions. Look at someone's photo album and it will be brimming with sunshine, foreign climes and people smiling. It would be easy to conclude that they live a charmed life where it never rains, people are always happy and there's no need to work. The photograph album effect occurs when we imagine the snippets we see of someone's life are representative. The comparison inevitably leaves us falling short. Compare and despair.
"When we admire someone, we are much more inclined to imitate them", explains Professor Guy Claxton, co-director, Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester. "And so we are drawn to, and are more likely to emulate, people who have excelled at something we enjoy but do only moderately and people with charisma, even if they don't deliver the goods."
This explains the choice of hurdler or rower as after- dinner speaker as well as the liberal distribution of corporate autobiographies at the end of management conferences.
The heart of the problem is that the language of business is dull. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then talking about business is like cooking with clay.
The answer lies not with flawed analogies and the lustre of CEO celebrities but in finding ways to make business interesting by telling stories and importing our passion from the stadium into the office.
WWE News: Money in the Bank PPV preview - Examiner
Get ready for the Olympics with exclusive coverage from London.
Don't miss a beat
Business schools offering PR tips to future CEOs - msnbc.com
By STEPHEN SINGER
AP Business Writer
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Whether it's corporate fraud, the Gulf oil spill, shoddy products or even the recession and weak recovery, capitalism's reputation is taking a beating, but public relations executives hope they have a fix for America's future CEOs.
The Public Relations Society of America has launched a pilot project at five business schools to teach MBA students how to handle crises and preserve corporate reputations.
"CEOs have made egregious mistakes in transparency and governance," said Gerard Corbett, chairman and CEO of the public relations group. "This initiative is to get executives at the beginning of their careers and understand the nature and purpose of good reputation management."
Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Quinnipiac University's School of Business and the University of Texas at El Paso's College of Business Administration are participating in the pilot project.
The schools will offer a public relations course in their MBA programs in the 2012-2013 school year and document what works best in subject matter and teaching methods. Teaching corporate communications is not new, but the pilot program intends to develop a model course offering lessons on establishing a brand, social responsibility, using the media and other subjects that will be part of a course adopted by business schools across the U.S.
Paul Argenti, who teaches corporate responsibility and corporate communications at Dartmouth's Tuck School, said company executives need to know how to communicate to staff, communities, investors, regulators and others about a range of issues.
"If you're downsizing, don't try to make it look better than what it is, but communicate what we're doing and why we're doing it," he said.
Matt O'Connor, dean of the business school at Quinnipiac University, said MBA programs are stepping up public relations training to give future business officials a new skill.
"If you're the executive hiring the public relations firm you'd like to know a little about public relations," he said.
Kathy Fitzpatrick, a professor of public relations in the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University, said the business school courses will reflect that the field has moved from communications to counseling executives on how to manage problems.
"It's not about sugar-coating and preserving happy images and smiling faces," she said.
The courses will be electives, but because 80 percent of MBA programs have no public relations course, just offering the course as an elective "is a critical first step," said Joe Cohen, a board member of the public relations society and senior vice president of MWW Group, a public relations firm.
The drive to improve PR education in business schools coincides with a projected 21 percent increase in the number of public relations jobs from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's faster than average job growth and is a response to businesses and government agencies responding quickly to news and information that move fast on the Internet and social media, the labor agency said.
O'Connor said business schools typically use case studies such as BP's handling of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, deaths in Chicago caused by Tylenol tampering in 1982 and Union Carbide's lethal gas leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984. The new course will teach MBA students how to use public relations to respond to everyday issues, he said.
"There have always been cases in the MBA curriculum that dealt with handling disasters or bad news or some problem that arises in the firm, but I don't think many business school professors have real expertise in public relations," he said.
Corporate fraud also gives businesses a black eye. The FBI said it was pursuing 726 corporate fraud cases nationally in 2011, and in several cases, each involved losses to public investors of more than $1 billion.
And thousands of trial lawyers are at work every day, suing businesses over allegations that their products are faulty or dangerous. Christopher Scholl, spokesman for the American Association of Justice, previously the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, said public relations has no bearing on product liability issues being litigated in court.
"I don't think there's any real connection there," he said.
Environmentalists, too, say PR has its limits. Bob Deans, spokesman for the National Resources Defense Council, said businesses are doing a better job showing that they are better stewards of rivers, streams and other resources.
But the BP oil spill was an environmental and public relations disaster, he said.
"You couldn't whitewash the fact that the spill impacted wildlife tragically," Deans said.
Argenti said business executives also face an angry public because of problems beyond their reach such as the state of the economy. The downturn that started with the Great Recession in late 2007 and the weak recovery that followed have soured Americans on private enterprise, he said.
Bethany Kraft, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Program for Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group, said public relations is effective when a company demonstrates it's fixing a problem.
"PR becomes a problem when it's clear a good image is more important than making things right," she said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Outsourced: Obama Campaign Raises Money in China--Again - Big Hollywood
The Obama campaign may be attacking Republican rival Mitt Romney for investing abroad, but it is not shy about raising campaign cash overseas. Last week, the campaign held a fundraiser for American expatriates in Shanghai, raking in large sums from those benefiting from the sort of personal and professional investment overseas that President Barack Obama has cast as unpatriotic in a recent attack ad against Romney.
It is not the first time the Obama campaign has raised money overseas. In 2008, the campaign held similar events in Shanghai (photo above). Earlier this month, it raised money on July 4th in Paris, and though the new Obama attack ad uses a Swiss flag to denounce Romney's foreign investments, the Obama campaign is bringing Hollywood superstar George Clooney to Switzerland next month for a huge fundraising event.
The overseas contributions are legal, as long as they are made by American citizens. But the Obama campaign had to return a number of overseas contributions from non-citizens in the 2008 cycle, and it has been accused once again of being too lax in preventing such contributions in 2012. Regardless, the hypocrisy of attacking Romney for investment abroad, then raising money from those working and investing abroad, is glaring.
Photo credit: Woodie Alan
U.S. prepare criminal case against banks that fixed interest rates in global scandal - Daily Mail
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The investigation into the LIBOR interest rate-rigging scandal is widening as the U.S. Justice Department is expected to file criminal charges against individual employees and at least one bank later this year.
As well as building cases against several banks, the department’s criminal division is also targeting individuals at the center of the scandal, including traders at Barclays, according to government officials who spoke anonymously to The New York Times.
In a global investigation, authorities are examining whether financial firms fraudulently manipulated interest rates to improve their profits and appear healthier than they were.
Criminal investigation: The Justice Department is working to file criminal charges against banks and individual employees at the centre of the LIBOR interest rate-rigging scandal (file photo)
Last month British bank Barclays was fined $453 million after admitting to influencing the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate).
Despite being set in London, the LIBOR is the average interest rate agreed by the world's largest international banks and indexes the short and long term interest rates for 10 currencies across 15 different time zones.
The LIBOR impacts every financial service and product across the planet and in the U.S. in 2008, 60 percent of prime adjustable rate mortgages and almost all of sub-prime mortgages were tied to LIBOR.
However, the $453 million settlement does not protect Barclays employees from criminal prosecution.
With the prospect of possible criminal charges, several financial institutions, including at least two European firms, are scrambling to arrange deals with the government, the Times reported, citing lawyers close to the case.
Given the broad scope of the Libor case and the number of institutions thought to be involved, the investigations could provide authorities with a 'signature moment' to hold big banks accountable for misdeeds during the financial crisis, which hit global markets from late 2007, the newspaper said.
While the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s regulatory inquiry could lead to fines and an overhaul of how banks are internally controlled the Justice Department’s investigation could result in criminal fraud cases against individual employees. If found guilty, they could face jail.
Settlements: Faced with potential criminal lawsuits, several banks are working to arrange settlements, lawyers close to the case said
It has been alleged that the world's largest banks have been fraudulently fixing interest rates around the world for at least the past decade, if not for a much longer period of time.
The fraud was uncovered when Barclay's Bank in London was discovered to have been submitting false figures to the LIBOR to improve their trading position.
By manipulating the LIBOR, by raising or lowering it, banks allegedly could make their balance sheets appear healthier than they were, while consumers and members of the public apparently paid the shortfall.
Warning sign: In June British bank Barclays was fined $453 million after admitting to influencing the LIBOR
Although it is not clear which institutions the Justice Department is tackling next, The New York Times reported that the Swiss bank UBS is lined up to be targeted for regulatory action.
UBS has already made an immunity deal with one division of the Justice Department, potentially shielding the bank from criminal prosecution, reported the newspaper.
Furthermore, cities and states have begun to sue some of the world's largest banks as the LIBOR scandal continues to spread across the globe.
The prospect of criminal cases may trigger institutions into seeking settlements and end there rather then indictments, according to officials close to the case.
As the global investigation continues, Justice Department authorities are being hampered by a lack of access to documents from big banks abroad which they are struggling to gain permission to.
Here's what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.
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So are we about to discover that all the commodity markets are made up, savings interest has been fixed artificially low and all the insurance markets are rigged? The scale of Labour's Enron decade is unbelievable. All of their surviving politicians who were involved in the finances during their time in office need to be expelled from parliament immediately - and that means you too Balls!
- so our whole economy, was made up?, 16/7/2012 00:04
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Why are some people still holding the subprime crisis responsible for everything. Is it also responsible for the Tsunami in Japan last year? What does subprime have to do with Greece, Spain, and Ireland, property bubbles and wasting money on useless infrastructure projects. Get a grip, and a better education while you are at it.
- whomever wherever, Somewhere in the Lone Star, 15/7/2012 23:38
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The British tax payers bail out the banks so they can pay fines to the USA? Talk about getting shafted from all directions. When are you going to grow a pair, citizens of Britain, and say enough is enough?
- Zakki Wakki, London UK, 15/7/2012 21:56
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And WHO is going to LOOK AT THE BANKS IN THE GOOD OLD USA... it all started there when all said and done.... Where are any of our TAX PAYERS MONEY IN FINES GOING......Stright into the USA coffers ?- bill p, france, 15/7/2012 19:18 X,,,,,,,,,,,If you stopped writing dumb comments and took the time to look you'll see the US justice dept is after US banks as well as British,German.Swiss and others,if guilty they'll end up in US jails with plenty of other bankers already there doing real time unlike soft touch Europe.As for the fines it was America who initiated the Barclay's case thats why the majority of fines go to America,Jesus you people are really lead up the garden path by these tame inquiries and a euro media.
- Bomber, Essex, 15/7/2012 21:54
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Barclays were not discovered. They told the authorities and worse still the BOE and liebour ignored the warnings and either let or encouraged bARC to lower their submissions. In all this and the more you read BARC are the cleanest out there!!!!
- Gary, Oldham, 15/7/2012 21:52
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In America the authorities are preparing to investigate and prosecute these rate fixers. In England the Government doesn't think and investigation is warranted, at least not by a proper panel. Wait a while and everything will go back as it has always been and many of these fixers will be rewarded with OBE s for................guess what............"SERVICES TO BANKING !!!
- Theo , Warrington Cheshire, 15/7/2012 20:59
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While Osborne and Dave are all talk, the US takes action. The POSH boys will look weak again. It might not just be Osborne looking for a new job after the summer but DC as well.
- Nick, London, 15/7/2012 20:43
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LOL...and which court can we take the US to for dragging us into pointless wars and printing worthless paper money to manipulate every commodity and transaction in the world? I guess the end of the US Dollar is near.
- Special K, London, 15/7/2012 19:55
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Glad I started investing in gold and silver decades ago and only getting paid in cash!! Come down on these so and so's like a ton of bricks and fine them billions!
- paul, milton keynes, UK, 15/7/2012 19:34
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And WHO is going to LOOK AT THE BANKS IN THE GOOD OLD USA... it all started there when all said and done.... Where are any of our TAX PAYERS MONEY IN FINES GOING......Stright into the USA coffers ?
- bill p, france, 15/7/2012 19:18
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