Maybe — just maybe — Bank of America has a well-thought-out plan behind its debit card fees: Maybe it actually WANTS customers to leave. Crazy talk, you say? Not sure about that. ING Direct has been lauded for “firing” customers. Bank Technology News wrote this a while back: “To promote customer homogeneity and keep costs down, ING Direct won’t hesitate to fire customers who demand too much. Better to win over customers with shrewd marketing and good rates wrought by the cost efficiencies of doing business online.” So, rather than flat-out telling unprofitable — or potentially unprofitable – customers to close … Continue Reading →

Do Gen Yers know of Rodney Dangerfield? Baby boomers think him as a great stand-up comedian, and Gen Xers revere him for his part in the movie that so many of them consider to be the greatest of all-time: Caddyshack. For many of us, we’ll always remember him by his tag line: “I don’t get no respect.” Which leads us, naturally, to e-mail marketing. Talk about getting no respect. If you listen to the social media gurus, e-mail is dead, and any firm still doing e-mail marketing is a dinosaur that should be put out to pasture. Thankfully, there are a lot of … Continue Reading →

The U.S. Federal Reserve has released its proposal for debit card interchange rate changes, and proposed a flat rate of 12 cents (US$) per transaction. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG) issued a press release claiming the following: ”The proposed regulations will benefit consumers by lowering the billions of dollars annually in non-negotiable swipe fees paid by merchants to large banks and the dominant credit card networks. These changes will lower the prices of everyday goods for all consumers including cash customers.” My take:  The impact on the average U.S. household — if any — will be negligible. I’d love … Continue Reading →

The term “killer app” gets thrown around a lot, so here’s what I’m thinking it means when I use it: An app that drives a step-function increase in the adoption of a technology. Spreadsheets are the best example of a killer app that I know of. It might be hard for many Gen Yers to imagine what the world was like before the Internet, let alone before PCs. But when PCs first arrived on the scene, their widespread adoption was not a slam dunk. After all, we had word processors for word processing (duh!) and mainframe and mini computers for … Continue Reading →