the mozo blog

**The following blog has been updated. Please see comments below for more detail.**

We love a good personal crusade here at Mozo HQ. So when we recently received a passionate plea from a concerned citizen questioning why internet fund transfers aren’t in real time, we thought it was worth publishing and doing some number crunching to figure out what the delay adds up to.

Here is the full article:

All internet funds transfers should be in real time.

The Banks have a privileged position in the economy being a necessity for the flow of funds through the market. Their privilege is not matched by their overweighted focus on results for the shareholders as opposed to the better good of the country. Their protests that margins have to rise to keep the banks strong and therefore benefit the community are difficult to accept when there is likely greater benefit to the economy by their measured increases in rates similar to the RBA. The out of order rise from the CBA is more an indicator that that Bank got it wrong with their risk management and we are paying for it.

There is much comment lately about how the Banks need to treat the customer fairly. There are different ways this could be addressed. My crusade for fairness is to enable all electronic transactions to be real time. For example when you make a funds transfer on the internet to pay a bill or a BPay transaction to pay a bill it should not take 1, 2 or 3 days to arrive at the destination.

Let the Banks try that trick at the supermarket checkout! It could take several days to complete the shop because we would have to wait for the funds to arrive at the Woolies or Coles account. That is not going to happen.

The Banks have the systems to achieve this now. The real time gross settlement system will allow this. Oh I forgot, you can go to your bank and request such a transfer to another person’s account if you want to pay a fee of about $35.

EFTPOS transactions are immediate. The transfer is completed while we wait. Money has moved from my account to another account because I authorised it. Why does that not happen with internet banking for individuals and business? I know there are businesses large enough that they have systems through the Bank that allow this but this must be made available to all.

Why, because the Bank has taken the funds from my account and only once they have finished investing it overnight or for three days to squeeze every last earning out it will the Bank allow it to continue on its journey. Why do I wait for three days for my funds to arrive? That is costing me interest if it is paying a credit card. If the debit is from an overdraft then it is costing me at both ends.

If the Banks are the conduit, the pipe is blocked and needs a clean out. Regulate that if there are clear funds in an account that a funds transfer to another account should be real time.
– ends –

And what about the numbers?

Let’s take UBank as an example. It recently announced that it has $5 billion in deposits. It seems common for UBank to have a 3 day delay coming in or out. All $5 billion had to get in there, and will come out again at some point, and so it loses up to 6 days of interest. At UBank’s 6.51%, that’s over $5 million [edit: $2.5 million - see comments below] windfall to the banks – and that’s just on the money in UBank.

Does that sound fair?

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With all of the election buzz, it can be easy to forget some of the key issues, media blunders and budgie smugglers that came up throughout the year. Our eyes gloss over and our brains turn to mush as we are hit with empty promises and rhetoric.

In the same way, the bank earnings season kidnaps our conscious mind. Soaring profits and shareholder returns take precedence, and we begin to forget about some of the biggest rip-offs, disasters and general foul plays that banks have made over the last year.

In true Mozo fashion, we have created a quick 1 minute voting booth – where the community can vote on these real issues and remind the banks that we haven’t forgotten.

Have your say:

With high competition for customers on both the lending and savings/deposit fronts, it is often the everyday transaction account that gets forgotten by many providers and consumers. Viewed by many as a simple vanilla account, many Australians are oblivious to the fact that there are some great, innovative products out there, all geared to help them save money.

For example, both BankWest and ING Direct offer transaction accounts that reimburse ATM fees. A more innovative product is Suncorp Bank’s everyday options account, which is an everyday account that can link to multiple savings accounts as well as lock away part of your funds to a term deposit “flexiRate”.

St. George’s latest offering, St George SENSE Savings, is similar in many ways to Suncorp’s with a few different bells and whistles. The ‘SENSE’ account is effectively an amalgam of St. George’s leading savings and transactions accounts with a few clever gimmicks to help things along.

The first innovative add on is that you receive a combined statement for both accounts. SENSE also comes with a range of pretty snazzy and informative graphs that help you track your spending. One of them is a pie chart that breaks down your everyday spending by categories, such as leisure, home expenses, and transport. There’s also a bar graph version that shows these amounts month to month. Plus you get a graph outlining your savings progress in relation to your set target.

There’s also the Sense Rounding Contribution graph -and this is what really sets this product apart. What exactly is a rounding contribution? Well, every time you make a purchase on your debit card, the SENSE account automatically rounds up the transaction to the nearest dollar and takes that balance from your everyday account and puts it into your savings bucket. For example, say I bought a coffee and a croissant on my way in to work that costs me $5.30. If I pay using my SENSE account, $6 gets taken out of my account. $5.30 goes to the barista and the remaining $0.70 goes into my SENSE savings account. The same process also applies to all BPay transactions too. It’s a really nifty way to start saving without putting any effort in.

All the standard perks come too – if you deposit over $2000 a month into the account you don’t pay an annual fee, there’s no minimum balance required, a VISA debit card, and all the convenience of having linked accounts, such as ease of transfers and regular payments. The savings account comes with a reasonable 4.85% rate as well.

So hats off to St. George. They’ve managed to craft a simple, yet intuitive and innovative product that redefines the relationship between the transaction and the savings account. For all those that struggle with saving, or simply having to manage two accounts, this is one option that could make a lot of SENSE.

Find the best savings account rates at mozo.com.au.

A story came out this week that seemed 10 years too late – owing to a computer glitch, a sizeable number of Bank of Queensland and BankWest ATM and eftpos machines malfunctioned and stopped working. The reason? An internal clock in the devices ticked over to 2016 instead of 2010, thereby rendering any card with an expiry date earlier than 2016 out of date.

It was always a disappointment to me when the millennium rolled in and nothing happened. Kevin Costner had a large part to play in this, my desire to live in a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland piqued after watching Waterworld. I bought the canned goods and the bottled water. I sacrificed an entire summer’s worth of backyard cricket so I could construct a fallout shelter in the garden. So it was with glee and perhaps the tiniest glimmer of hope that I read about this latest development.

Were there irregularities in the time space continuum in Queensland and Western Australia? Should I be expecting a drive-by visit from a Delorean? More importantly, should I evict the 20 Israeli backpackers from my bomb shelter? They’ve been a real cash cow through the recession.

The whole saga got me thinking about what the world of banking will be like 6 years from now so I’ve constructed a basic timeline of events:

2011 – Gail Kelly becomes a blender jockey at her local Boost Juice after getting the heave-ho from Westpac on the back of a failure to glean a single home loan application in 2010.

2012 – In a bloody coup, the two American marketing gurus in the Commonwealth Bank ads take over the bank and install basketball hoops in branches and hand out money box transformers to kids, actually making going to the bank somewhat enjoyable. This popularity springboards them ahead of the competition and they take over an ailing Westpac, re-branding themselves as ‘Compac’.

2013 - NAB forced by the Australian government, led by a Hologram of the late John Howard, to annex ANZ when a financially crippled New Zealand becomes an Australian state (South Tasmania) and the unifying moniker of National Australia Bank was deemed to suffice for both.

2014 – Compac flourish for a couple of years till they are successfully sued for billions of dollars by American computer manufacturer ‘Compaq’ for copyright infringement. Daily Telegraph headline reports that the outcome has put the ‘Bank back into bankrupt’. Daily Telegraph headline writer fired.

2015 – With ‘Compac’ in dire straits, all their concerns are taken over by NAB. NAB renamed ‘The Bank’.

2016 - Nationwide backlash to what Howard labels a “perceived lack of competition”. Financial markets crippled as investors lose faith in “The Bank” after a 0.25% Reserve Bank increase is met with a 15% rise in the mortgage rate.

Year 0 – Former ANZ upper management turned radical New Zealand nationalists hacked into the software controlling the Howard hologram, and through a series of poorly thought out foreign policy moves, make North Korea unleash three nuclear warheads. Only those of us with fallout shelters remain. We have no oil or water, but luckily I have Gail Kelly with me to make me smoothies, fruit whips and juices. And there isn’t a financial institution in sight.

I guess the apocalypse ain’t so bad after all…

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The recent rise in popularity of debit cards may have some people thinking their credit card is yesterday’s plastic. Driven by the surge in internet transactions, debit cards are a league ahead of their ATM/EFTPOS predecessors, offering the benefits of greater acceptance without the risk of greater spending.

While debit cards are not new (most banks and credit unions have been offering them for years), MasterCard and Visa have recently increased their presence here to compete with EFTPOS. Since it was introduced, EFTPOS has had little competition in Australia, but the boffins at EFTPOS haven’t kept up with the times, and more specifically, the internet, opening the door for the debit card.

It seems the newly refurbished Visa and MasterCard debit cards will soon usurp the throne of EFTPOS to become the new norm. However, debit still faces the competition of the credit card. So who will reign supreme?

Credit Cards:

Pros:

• You have access to money that isn’t yours for impulse purchases before your pay day
• Rewards programs
• Travel insurance (on some cards)
• Accepted almost everywhere as a form of payment

Cons:

• You have access to money that isn’t yours for impulse purchases before your pay day
• Annual, late payment, rewards program and dishonour fees
• Interest payments on outstanding balances
• Cash withdrawals (or ‘cash advances’) incur hefty fees and interest rates

Debit Cards

Pros:

• You’re using your own money so you never have to worry about interest payments
• Accepted almost everywhere as a form of payment (including overseas ATMs)
• You can use it to withdraw money from an ATM or get cash out with purchases

Cons:

• There are fees associated with some debit cards.
• There are no rewards programs
• You could be tempted to spend more money over the internet simply because you now have the access

The verdict:
Credit cards are great if you want rewards more than you mind annual fees, and will pay off your balance before the interest rate kicks in. If this isn’t you, then debit cards are the way to go. Happy spending people!

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Compare debit cards at mozo.com.au