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  • Is Financial Inclusion an Obligation or an Opportunity for Banks?

    - by tushar.chitra
    Why should banks care about financial inclusion? First, the statistics, I think this will set the tone for this blog post. There are close to 2.5 billion people who are excluded from the banking stream and out of this, 2.2 billion people are from the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia (McKinsey on Society: Global Financial Inclusion). However, this is not just a third-world phenomenon. According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), in the US, post 2008 financial crisis, one family out of five has either opted out of the banking system or has been moved out (American Banker). Moving this huge unbanked population into mainstream banking is both an opportunity and a challenge for banks. An obvious opportunity is the significant untapped customer base that banks can target, so is the positive brand equity a bank can build by fulfilling its social responsibilities. Also, as banks target the cost-conscious unbanked customer, they will be forced to look at ways to offer cost-effective products and services, necessitating technology upgrades and innovations. However, cost is not the only hurdle in increasing the adoption of banking services. The potential users need to be convinced of the benefits of banking and banks will also face stiff competition from unorganized players. Finally, the banks will have to believe in the viability of this business opportunity, and not treat financial inclusion as an obligation. In what ways can banks target the unbanked For financial inclusion to be a success, banks should adopt innovative business models to develop products that address the stated and unstated needs of the unbanked population and also design delivery channels that are cost effective and viable in the long run. Through business correspondents and facilitators In rural and remote areas, one of the major hurdles in increasing banking penetration is connectivity and accessibility to banking services, which makes last mile inclusion a daunting challenge. To address this, banks can avail the services of business correspondents or facilitators. This model allows banks to establish greater connectivity through a trusted and reliable intermediary. In India, for instance, banks can leverage the local Kirana stores (the mom & pop stores) to service rural and remote areas. With a supportive nudge from the central bank, the commercial banks can enlist these shop owners as business correspondents to increase their reach. Since these neighborhood stores are acquainted with the local population, they can help banks manage the KYC norms, besides serving as a conduit for remittance. Banks also have an opportunity over a period of time to cross-sell other financial products such as micro insurance, mutual funds and pension products through these correspondents. To exercise greater operational control over the business correspondents, banks can also adopt a combination of branch and business correspondent models to deliver financial inclusion. Through mobile devices According to a 2012 world bank report on financial inclusion, out of a world population of 7 billion, over 5 billion or 70% have mobile phones and only 2 billion or 30% have a bank account. What this means for banks is that there is scope for them to leverage this phenomenal growth in mobile usage to serve the unbanked population. Banks can use mobile technology to service the basic banking requirements of their customers with no frills accounts, effectively bringing down the cost per transaction. As I had discussed in my earlier post on mobile payments, though non-traditional players have taken the lead in P2P mobile payments, banks still hold an edge in terms of infrastructure and reliability. Through crowd-funding According to the Crowdfunding Industry Report by Massolution, the global crowdfunding industry raised $2.7 billion in 2012, and is projected to grow to $5.1 billion in 2013. With credit policies becoming tighter and banks becoming more circumspect in terms of loan disbursals, crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative channel for lending. Typically, these initiatives target the unbanked population by offering small loans that are unviable for larger banks. Though a significant proportion of crowdfunding initiatives globally are run by non-banking institutions, banks are also venturing into this space. The next step towards inclusive finance Banks by themselves cannot make financial inclusion a success. There is a need for a whole ecosystem that is supportive of this mission. The policy makers, that include the regulators and government bodies, must be in sync, the IT solution providers must put on their thinking caps to come out with innovative products and solutions, communication channels such as internet and mobile need to expand their reach, and the media and the public need to play an active part. The other challenge for financial inclusion is from the banks themselves. While it is true that financial inclusion will unleash a hitherto hugely untapped market, the normal banking model may be found wanting because of issues such as flexibility, convenience and reliability. The business will be viable only when there is a focus on increasing the usage of existing infrastructure and that is possible when the banks can offer the entire range of products and services to the large number of users of essential banking services. Apart from these challenges, banks will also have to quickly master and replicate the business model to extend their reach to the remotest regions in their respective geographies. They will need to ensure that the transactions deliver a viable business benefit to the bank. For tapping cross-sell opportunities, banks will have to quickly roll-out customized and segment-specific products. The bank staff should be brought in sync with the business plan by convincing them of the viability of the business model and the need for a business correspondent delivery model. Banks, in collaboration with the government and NGOs, will have to run an extensive financial literacy program to educate the unbanked about the benefits of banking. Finally, with the growing importance of retail banking and with many unconventional players eyeing the opportunity in payments and other lucrative areas of banking, banks need to understand the importance of micro and small branches. These micro and small branches can help banks increase their presence without a huge cost burden, provide bankers an opportunity to cross sell micro products and offer a window of opportunity for the large non-banked population to transact without any interference from intermediaries. These branches can also help diminish the role of the unorganized financial sector, such as local moneylenders and unregistered credit societies. This will also help banks build a brand awareness and loyalty among the users, which by itself has a cascading effect on the business operations, especially among the rural and un-banked centers. In conclusion, with the increasingly competitive banking sector facing frequent slowdowns and downturns, the unbanked population presents a huge opportunity for banks to enhance their customer base and fulfill their social responsibility.

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  • Financial Transparency is Good for Community

    - by ArnieRowland
    I was recently in a conversation with several people that had previously organized one or more community events. The topic evolved into a discussion of Sponsors, and eventually, fund raising. Being able to adequately raise the funds necessary is critical to producing a successful event. Many vendors will readily provide products for raffles and give-aways (SWAG), but the success of the event hangs on being able to raise cold, hard, cash. Venues and equipment have to be rented, refreshments and lunches...(read more)

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  • Navigant Consulting Implements Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 to Integrate Financial and HR Information

    - by jay.richey
    Integration to Help Global Consultancy Increase Business Productivity and Streamline Operations Redwood Shores, Calif. - Dec. 15, 2010 "Our business is based on the seamless execution and expertise of our highly-trained consultants and we're always seeking ways to improve processes so they can focus on providing excellent client service," said Changappa Kodendera, CIO, Navigant Consulting. "Our phased implementation of Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 will provide us with a solid technology foundation that we can rely on to support our global consulting business, with a scalable platform that facilitates further improvement." Read the press release Watch their video

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  • Free vs. Paid: Picking a Financial Model

    - by ashes999
    I finally embarked upon my first "paid" game. What this means is that I will incorporate some sort of monetization strategy in my game. This may mean making the app pay-to-download, making it "freemium" with paid content, or something else. Having never done something like this, I'm at a complete loss as to how to figure out what I should do. I know a couple of models (pay to download, freemium, etc.) and I can brainstorm some ideas. But how do I figure out what strategy to use? Perhaps there's some body of research on this? (I recall reading that MMOs popular in Korea use a model where cosmetic changes only are pay-to-buy; everything else is free).

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  • PeopleSoft's Enterprise Financial Management 8.9

    Fred interviews Annette Melatti, Senior Director Financials Product Marketing and discusses the latest release and the value this release offers to customers including compliance, superior ownership experience, industry specific solution extensions, enhancements to the enterprise service automation solution and the introduction of the new asset lifecycle management solution.

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  • Planning for the Recovery

    - by john.orourke(at)oracle.com
    As we plan for 2011, there are many positive signs in the global economy, but also some lingering issues. Planning no longer is about extrapolating past performance and adjusting for growth. It is now about constantly testing the temperature of the water, formulating scenarios, assessing risk and assigning probabilities.  So how does one plan for recovery and improve forecast accuracy in such a volatile environment?  Here are some suggestions from a recent article I wrote, which was published in the December Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) newsletter from the AFP (Association of Financial Professionals): Increase the frequency of forecasting Get more line managers involved in the planning and forecasting process Re-consider what's being measured - i.e. key financial and operational metrics Incorporate risk and probability into forecasts Reduce reliance on spreadsheets - leverage packaged EPM applications To learn more about these best practices, check out the FP&A section of the AFP website and register to receive the FP&A newsletter.  AFP recently launched a new topic area focused on the FP&A function and items of interest to this group of finance professionals.  In addition to the FP&A quarterly newsletter, AFP will be publishing articles, running webinars and will have an FP&A track in their annual conference, which is in Boston next November.  Brian Kalish, AFP's Finance Lead, is hoping this initiative creates a valuable networking and information-sharing resource for FP&A professionals. Here's a link to the FP&A page on the AFP web site:  http://www.afponline.org/pub/res/topics/topics_fpa.html If you register on the site you can access and subscribe to the FP&A newsletter and other resources. Best of luck in your planning for 2011 and beyond!   

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  • How to create database records for a financial year

    - by David A Gibson
    Hello, I need to create entities (specifically contracts) in a database table that are associated with a financial year. These contracts will be applied to projects. Any contract variation will be recorded by creating a new contract record for the same financial year but the original will remain associated with the project as a history. The projects can last several years and so at any one time a project will have a live contract record for each year as well as any number of historic contracts for that year. All of which is incidental but I'm trying to provide some context. If the contracts where for the year - it would be easy and I'd just store the Year either as a date field with the 1st of January or just an Integer. However the contracts run for financial years and I don't know how to approach this. I don't want a separate table containing the financial years as I don't want the users to have to maintain this. I don't want to store the financial year as a string "2009/2010" as this is not ideal for sorting/extracting the data. Any ideas will be helpful, my best so far is to have starting and ending year in 2 columns and just "KNOW" that starting is April of the year etc Thanks

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  • Custommer Centric Wealth Management

    - by michael.seback
    While the world continues to search their way out of the recent financial turmoil and recession, it has no doubt churned out the inherent faults in the wealth management industry and the larger financial system. In order to counter these apprehensions, wealth management firms are now actively seeking and evaluating avenues to re-build the lost trust. They are looking at engaging their customers in managing their investments in a more collaborative and transparent manner. At the same time, wealth managers are also seeking to empower themselves with complete and comprehensive customer information in order to provide the best advice and the best solution at the right time. Read your copy of this new global White Paper on Wealth Management.

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  • How do you get a high paying job programming in finance?

    - by q303
    Hi, I'm interested in eventually programming for a financial company. Unfortunately, I have a degree in linguistics with a minor in CS along with 4 years experience in .NET. I picked .NET because I thought that it would be more used in the financial world. I've heard some horror stories about badly done VBA Excel programming and being way underpaid...but then I've heard great stories about highly skilled C++ programming along with high pay (including some feedback to previous questions). I just get the impression that unless you have a MS in CS from a top 10/20 school, it might not be realistic. For those of you doing programming for bankers/traders, how did you break in?

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  • Are there free realtime financial data feeds since the demise of OpenQuant?

    - by Mel Cooper
    Now that the oligopole of market data providers successfully killed OpenQuant, does any alternative to proprietary and expensive subscriptions for realtime market data subsist? Ideally I would like to be able to monitor tick by tick securities from the NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX (about 6000 symbols). Most vendors put a limit of 500 symbols watchable at the same time, this is unacceptable to me, even if one can imagine a rotation among the 500 symbols ie. making windows of 5 sec. of effective observation out of each minute for every symbol. Currently I'm doing this by a Java thread pool calling Google Finance, but this is unsatisfactory for several reasons, one being that Google doesn't return the volume traded. Any hint much appreciated, Cheers

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  • Selecting financial values from db stored as text

    - by Midhat
    I have some financial values stored as text in a mysql db. the significance of financial is that negative numbers are stored enclosed in paranthesis. is there a way to automatically get the numeric value associated with that text. (like '5' shoudl be retuned as 5 and '(5)' should be returned as -5)

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  • Neuberger Berman Defines CRM Strategy In Asset Management

    - by michael.seback
    Neuberger Berman Defines Front Office Strategy for the New Firm Neuberger Berman is a majority employee-owned independent asset management firm with a heritage dating back to 1939. It provides a range of investment options, wealth planning services, and advice to meet individual needs. It also offers a broad range of financial capabilities and specializes in developing innovative and customized investment solutions for institutions. ... "The Insight team's analysis was critical to helping us assess the strengths and weaknesses of our Siebel implementation. It helped us to come up with our strategic plan for using customer relationship management and business intelligence capabilities." - Roxana Feldmann, Senior Vice President Technology ...Read more.

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  • Which platform to choose, Java or .NET?

    - by salman
    I am working in a private bank, a leading mid size bank in local market. We are going to create our core banking solution. Existing solution has been developed on Java using IBM Visual Age 4.0. It is very important to discuss architecture first, we have currently more than 350 branches working in standalone mode, and it means they are working in self contained environment. They have their own database server (IBM DB2 9.7) and they are communicating with other branches via sockets to send and receive data. Having experience of .NET for more than 5 years I am trying to convince my superiors to choose .NET platform, but they are reluctant and unwilling. It is my job to encourage them for choosing best available platform to create large scale enterprise application. In simple word, we are going to create a very large scale enterprise financial application, a centralize and integrated which connects all branch networks plus having scalable, solid architecture that easily evolve over time. I want professional people to comment on above scenarios. Which platform to choose .NET or Java? Our all resource is currently working in Java, we have homogeneous environment (no Linux, no Mac and no UNIX). Any idea, any thoughts, any points technical or non-technical i.e. administrative or management point of view will be really appreciated.

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  • Financial applications on GPGPU

    - by CUDA-dev
    I want to know what sort of financial applications can be implemented using a GPGPU. I'm aware of Option pricing/ Stock price estimation using Monte Carlo simulation on GPGPU using CUDA. Can someone enumerate the various possibilities of utilizing GPGPU for any application in Finance domain,

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  • Best/Most Comprehensive API for Stocks/Financial Data

    - by Wilco
    What is the most recommended free/public API for accessing financial market stats and stock quotes (preferrably real-time quotes)? I'm not too picky about how it's exposed (SOAP, REST, some proprietary XML setup, etc.), as long as it's got some decent documentation. I'm planning to build a simple web dashboard in PHP with some basic data (basically a quick-n-dirty homepage), but may want to grow it into a full blown web app eventually. Any thoughts? As I find some, I'll post a list here (feel free to comment if you've used any of them before): Free opentick (soprano) Not Free XigniteRealTime

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  • Inheritance vs specific types in Financial Modelling for cashflows

    - by BlueTrin
    Hello, I have to program some financial applications where I have to represent a schedule of flows. The flows can be of 3 types: - fee flow (just a lump payment at some date) - floating rate flow (the flow is dependant of an interest rate to be determined at a later date) - fixed rate flow (the flow is dependant of an interest rate determined when the deal is done) I need to keep the whole information and I need to represent a schedule of these flows. Originally I wanted to use inheritance and create three classes FeeFlow, FloatingFlow, FixedFlow all inheriting from ICashFlow and implement some method GetFlowType() returning an enum then I could dynamic_cast the object to the correct type. That would allow me to have only one vector to represent my schedule. What do you think of this design, should I rather use three vectors vector, vector and vector to avoid the dynamic casts ?

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  • The Top 5 Business Challenges in Financial Services. Oracle Process Accelerators as a Solution By Lance Shaw

    - by JuergenKress
    Here at Oracle, we continue to release Process Accelerators for additional solutions.  These Accelerators help achieve process excellence faster with end-to-end implementations of common business processes.  They are Ready-to-use and extensible, and include industry specific best practices. One common industry where Process Accelerators are used to speed the delivery of business process management solutions is Financial Services.  We've recently produced a whitepaper that identifies the top five business challenges in the financial services industry and outlines how adopting Oracle Process Accelerators can give a competitive edge. To get the whitepaper please visit our website. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: financial services,process accelerators,Lance Shaw,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Data structure for pattern matching.

    - by alvonellos
    Let's say you have an input file with many entries like these: date, ticker, open, high, low, close, <and some other values> And you want to execute a pattern matching routine on the entries(rows) in that file, using a candlestick pattern, for example. (See, Doji) And that pattern can appear on any uniform time interval (let t = 1s, 5s, 10s, 1d, 7d, 2w, 2y, and so on...). Say a pattern matching routine can take an arbitrary number of rows to perform an analysis and contain an arbitrary number of subpatterns. In other words, some patterns may require 4 entries to operate on. Say also that the routine (may) later have to find and classify extrema (local and global maxima and minima as well as inflection points) for the ticker over a closed interval, for example, you could say that a cubic function (x^3) has the extrema on the interval [-1, 1]. (See link) What would be the most natural choice in terms of a data structure? What about an interface that conforms a Ticker object containing one row of data to a collection of Ticker so that an arbitrary pattern can be applied to the data. What's the first thing that comes to mind? I chose a doubly-linked circular linked list that has the following methods: push_front() push_back() pop_front() pop_back() [] //overloaded, can be used with negative parameters But that data structure seems very clumsy, since so much pushing and popping is going on, I have to make a deep copy of the data structure before running an analysis on it. So, I don't know if I made my question very clear -- but the main points are: What kind of data structures should be considered when analyzing sequential data points to conform to a pattern that does NOT require random access? What kind of data structures should be considered when classifying extrema of a set of data points?

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  • Oracle Hyperion Customer Briefing 2011

    - by antonella.buonagurio(at)oracle.com
    Lo scorso 24 febbraio a Milano e il 9 marzo a Roma si è tenuto l'Oracle Hyperion Customer Briefing 2011 un workshop riservato ai clienti Oracle su tutte le novità Oracle Hyperion EPM SYstem 11.1.2. La giornata si è sviluppata attraverso un percorso guidato di quattro sessioni tematiche su  come poter migliorare ulteriormente processi di management nelle  aziende in tutti gli ambiti di interesse.  

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