by Colin Baines | Sep 2014 | Comments
In July, rules came into force designed to curb the worst excesses of the payday lending industry. In particular the FCA limited the ability of payday lenders to ‘roll over’ customers into new borrowing arrangements and constrained their usage of direct debits to raid...
by Colin Baines | Aug 2014 | Comments
This is the term used to describe any smaller bank which ‘challenges’ the big 6 (Barclays, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds, Nationwide and Santander) for business. Increasingly borrowers are turning to challenger banks to increase their chance of getting a mortgage as the big high...
by Colin Baines | Jul 2014 | Comments
The Chief Executive of the FCA has issued a number of statements recently which all hang, more or less, on his mansion house speech last October, so it is worth noting some of his comments. ‘Many people think that we have now entered a compensation culture where it is...
by Colin Baines | Jun 2014 | Comments
‘Where are the frontiers between execution only on the one hand and full advice on the other?’ So queried the CEO of the country’s financial regulator, Martin Wheatley. It would be reasonable to suppose that he would have known this. However, he did go on, rather less...
by Colin Baines | May 2014 | Comments
Bitcoins are a peer to peer payment system and digital currency. They are created by a process called ‘mining’ in which computer network participants verify and record payments into a public ledger in exchange for transaction fees and newly minted Bitcoins. Bitcoins...
