Via wired blog, and from Renault, the car ad we’ve always really wanted to see:
Also check out the making of:
A response from BNZ
The BNZ please just pay my rent saga continues
Now they are asking me to sign up for the stupid security card (which I had done 2 dats prior) and to send a confirmation fax to get this particular payment through.
Nope. International faxes are just too hard these days. I don’t even plug my landline in, let alone own a fax. A photo of a document via email is normally accetable, just not to the BNZ. and yes – there are no doubt a host of internet faxing services, but I do not know or trust any.
So I am reduced – my beleaguered mother will execute this transaction for me, and BNZ loses even more karma. There is not a lot of BNZ karma left I can tell you, though no doubt my mother will have an excellent personal banker experience in Wellington.
So my search for a new bank continues – thanks to everyone that has commented, ASB looks the likely candidate.
BNZ doesn’t get it. Time to change banks
I’m renting a place here in Fremantle for 3-4 months, and my first rental payment is due.
I dutifully (ok a few days late as we had not sorted out dates) send a Telegraphic Transfer request via BNZ’s internet banking email system. This is something I do quite a lot, with the last one being the deposit and bond for this place on the 12th of last month.
I get an email back:
I’m in Perth right now, and so to get a NetGuard card would require 3-5 business days (and there are only 4 this week in NZ) PLUS the time taken to get the card to me in Australia. Moreover, I’m guessing that BNZ won’t send or allow you to send this stupid card internationally (try couriering credit cards).
So the alternative to to use the handy ‘branch locator’, which I do:
That’s right. No BNZ in Perth, and no BNZ in Australia. This seems crazy to me – BNZ is a huge bank, and there are hundreds of thousands of Kiwis in Australia, including out here in Perth. (Mining pays well these days)
So maybe I’m just going about it the wrong way. So – another approach:
But that gets me this:
So I try bnz.com instead:
Not that useful.
So… why should I trust my money to a bank that can’t even own its own domains?
Why should I trust my money to a bank that requires me to carry around a card for online security?
What happens if I lose my wallet with credit card and stupid online card? – yup, I’d be locked out.
I looked back, and sure enough on my last TT request there was the following in the confirmation email:
“Lance, I would like to take this opportunity to advise that from 1 October all TTs will require you to have logged into Internet Banking using NetGuard before we will complete your request.”
Sadly it was beneath the fold (line 26) of the confirmation email, which I browsed quickly just to make sure the payment went through. So the first time I saw this was today. Yes – perhaps I should read my emails completely.
Banks have you locked in
They say that banks have 4 opportunities in life to get you to switch to them: At birth/christening, when you are about 10 or so (pocket money), when you leave home/start university (student loans), and when you get a mortgage.
They also say (ok I’ve observed through consulting) that losing banking customers is actually really difficult to do. You really have to go out of your way to annoy them, or lose serious credibility, before customers will leave.
For me BNZ has provided great personal service at the various branches in Wellington, but has failed, and failed consistently with its IT – online and back end.
BNZ has failed with their Credit Card product
– My credit card limit is a trivial % of my annual income, despite repeated requests for (mostly granted) increases.
– My BNZ credit card bounced my Perth motorcycle purchase transaction, while my infrequently used Amex worked just fine
– Indeed it’s not the first time or even second I’ve failed to buy a motorcycle with a BNZ credit card, and succeeded with Amex.
– I received more than one offer to ‘upgrade’ my Mastercard to a visa with identical features and higher cost.
BNZ has lousy Customer Service
– BNZ’s after hours (and it is always after hours from home here) help desk is completely unable to help me, which is sad because I recall being able to speak to a very helpful night banker, who made magic happen, from the UK when buying a motorcycle back in 1996. What has happened?
– The products offered to me (usually in a TT email) are completely irrelevant to my situation.
Don’t talk to me about use BNZ for money Transfers
– I cannot send an international transfer without recourse to email.
– I now cannot send international transfers at all.
– It takes a day for transfers to go from from my BNZ check account to my BNZ credit card account
– It takes a day for transfers to go from my BNZ account to another BNZ account
– It takes a day for transfers to go from my BNZ account to any other NZ based account
– I’m charged $25 for a NZ to Australia TT transfer
NONE of this is acceptable in this era.
But the big question is can any other bank offer better? I’m going to look around, but do let me know if your experiences elsewhere are better.
Know all of Trade Me’s secrets – and get paid for it
Want to get deep inside Trade Me’s engine to understand how it works?
Then apply for Trade Me’s Manager – Strategy and Analytics role, and you will know all. Well – you’ll be exposed to the data fire hose anyway, and you’ll use any insights you find to help grow Trade Me. This was the area I wallowed in (when I wasn’t helping with valuations and the sale) at Trade Me, and if you are the sort of person that loves business, data and a cool work environment, then go for it.
– Ongoing modeling, budgeting and financial forecasting for our business lines. You would know intimately how well the different areas of our business are performing, and have strong opinions on their potential.
– Formulating and presenting ideas about how we can make more money. This includes internal opportunities, and the evaluation of potential acquisitions, joint ventures etc. You would manage the conversations we have with these external parties.
– Oversight the day-to-day running of our operational data and analytics operations, including all the numbers we use for decision support, performance indicators, and the measurement of site changes.
– The management of a growing and dynamic team to help you accomplish the above, and, if you’re up to it, senior management input at the exec level for the company.
Is WordPress in play?
PaidContent seems to think so, though the price WordPress reportedly will command ($150-300m) seems cheap for what is the dominant platform for serious bloggers.
How are you finding me?
So now we know what you are reading (it’s all about teenage love calculation), but how are you coming to this blog?
Well – here are the top search terms used over the last year to find posts on this site:
1: “xtra mail” (yup. I can’ believe it either)
2:”calculate the name of your perfect lover” (It’s a scam people)
3: “lance wiggs” (An answer to #2 perhaps? Not for teenagers I hasten to add.)
4: “crush calculator”
5: “love calculation”
6: “tvnzondemand”
7: “burger fuel”
8: “love calculator”
9: “burgerfuel”
10: “shipbuktu slow”
So there you have it. I’m not sure what it all means, but do feel free to comment.
What are you reading here? top 11, bottom 3
So – this blog has been around for almost a year now – the first post was on November 9th last year. It’s been a fun journey, and although statistics are fickle things it seems that about 2-300 people are visiting each day.
That’s pretty amazing – I had no idea I had that many relatives.
It’s interesting for me to see which posts attract traffic, and which posts don’t – and perhaps it is for you as well. Scary, but interesting.
Here are then, from the last 300 days, the top 11 posts, and the bottom 3. The stats capture the clicks on to a specific blog entry.
The top 11
1: Love Calculator – Vodafone and Google sh
2: Remove yourself from love lover and crus
3: ASA pings Love Calculator – but it is st
Yes – sadly the top three posts on this blog are trafficked by… teenagers searching for love.
4: BurgerFuel: value or not? (turned out not)
5: About me (it is all about me it seems)
6: tvnzondemand – streaming works on OSX (yes it does, but no downloads)
7: Gareth Morgan’s Kiwisaver calculater (apparently even bad spelling didn’t stop the pageviews)
8: More Fuel for the Burger Fuel fire (smoke, no fire)
9: psst – Want to earn over $100,000 per ye (Have a Doctorate, live in Gisborne)
10: xtra mail customers are going to Yahoo! (yes – they did. and oh how badly)
11: After xtra: Which email should you use? (linked to #10 – Google is the answer)
The Bottom 3
With just 7 direct hits, these didn’t get any click-through love:
His masters voice.. (Doesn’t anyone care what the world’s 3rd richest guy and best investor says?)
Ferrit. Incompetent (Am I wrong? relatives not relatves)
Holy advertising enormity! (An obnoxious ad format from theWest.com.au)
It’s an interesting journey, this blogging.
RSS Explained
I’ve just added a couple of links on the top right to make it easy to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed.
What’s RSS? Well here’s a fun low tech explanation of what RSS is, and how to use a reader, such as Google Reader.
it does get a bit long, but it’s worth seeing the first bit anyway even if you are an RSS junkie.
Capital One stumbles
Capital One has long had a reputation for employing smart people, and for being the best at segmenting the credit card market – targeting the right products at the right people.
Well – not such good news, via the Washington Post:
Capital One Financial of McLean posted its first quarterly loss ever, from the expense of shutting down its mortgage lender, and warned of additional challenges in the credit card and auto finance businesses.
Capital One reported an increasing number of delinquencies and defaults in both the credit card and auto finance sectors
however
The credit card business remained profitable for Capital One, with earnings up 21.5 percent from a year earlier. The company said rising delinquencies were largely a result of changing credit policies. This summer, Capital One told some customers that it would raise the interest rates and alter the grace periods on their credit cards.
but
“Consumers for a while were using their housing as ATM machines,” he said. Now they have increasingly turned to credit cards as a source of money, he said. Consumers already have considerable debt and may not have room to borrow more.
and
“If [credit card issuers] were to cut back significantly, that would have the potential to be a blow to spending,” he said.
This is a really bad sign to me – if these guys are getting it wrong, then it implies that many others are in a much worse situation – which means, well, incipient doom for a bunch of US households.
NZ’s Superannuation fund ranks highest
Good news, from the WSJ blog:
Ted Truman, a former top Federal Reserve and Treasury staffer now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank in Washington, with a scoreboard that ranks 32 sovereign wealth funds from 28 countries on 25 elements in four categories — structure, governance, transparency and accountability and behavior. His bottom line: New Zealand’s Superannuation Fund ($10 billion) and Norway’s oil-fueled Government Pension Fund-Global ($300 billion) score the highest. The Qatar Investment Authority ($50 billion) and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (estimated between $500 billion and $875 billion) score the lowest.
Sadly the Super fund is trivially sized in comparison with those others, but hey – perhaps they can follow the Yale model and turn out 20% year after year?
Expedia.co.nz launches – Good or Bad?
Expedia – the world’s largest travel agent, and a site I used a lot, err, last century, has finally arrived in New Zealand. Here’s a quick review.
That’s a mere 11 years after being founded by Microsoft in 1996 – nice to know we are important. It’s a classic case of the big boys discounting our small market, and allowing the likes of House of Travel and th airlines to take the market.
Anyway – is it worthwhile using Expedia.co.nz?
Well – for internal flights it looks like Expedia does better than the airline sites:
versus AirNZ:
plus
That’s $178 from the airline combo, and $145.91 from Expedia. Impressive. Very impressive – are Expedia operating on loss-leader margins?
But what about House of Travel (I hear you ask). It’s not a site I use, so I ran the same test.
On the one hand I got a cheapest fare of $157. (Less than Q+AirNZ, more than the $145 of Expedia).
On the other, actually choosing the same flights though gave me the same price as the airlines.
and on the other other hand – hitting Continue killed the process. (each time)
So – back to Expedia. As we could guess, the site is still very much skewed to the US traveller:
She’s not from here
Those aren’t our top hotel destinations
We don’t care about Honolulu (not at $2227)
Those aren’t our top rental car destinations.
So Expedia seems to lump us with Hawaii in some sort of ‘US South Pacific’, but hopefully the site will be tweaked as use becomes clear.
Overall – I fully expected the site to be totally US centric, and it is, but I certainly did not expect the cheaper fares that we see here. It’s a very interesting entrant to NZ market.
Dump dumping laws now (and don’t buy Croxley paper)
So Office Max (enterprise value US$4 billion), subsidiary Croxley Stationery, wins a NZ anti dumping case against 15 stationary importers from five South East Asian countries.
Apparently selling stuff in New Zealand for cheaper than other markets is bad.
The law is an ass – I’d rather have that cheaper stationary thank you, and I’d rather the US conglomerate competed fairly against it’s competitors without recourse to what is a woeful law.
Does the MED really think that 15 companies are COLLUDING to bring in stationary for less than it costs them overseas. Wouldn’t a rational mind think that perhaps we have a more competitive market here than they have in their home, and that all but one company in the NZ market are competing on a level playing field?
Companies will sell their products at the profit maximising price in any constituency. That means if there is healthy competition then the prices are lower, and if there is an oligopoly or monopoly then the prices will be higher. New Zealand has worked hard at free trade, at fair trade – and this sort of distorting decision puts us alongside, at least for stationary, the appalling trade laws in the USA.
NZ is 18th least taxed country in OECD
what a difference a headline can make.
Both Stuff and NZHerald went with “NZ is 13th most taxed country in the OECD”.
The OECD has 30 members – something that took me – oh – about 15 seconds to find. Or you could look at the handy chart int he NZHerald article.
eBay results – up and down
eBay reported a loss of a huge $936m – due to the recent huge write-down of Skype value. However otherwise theu showed some good signs, and some not so good signs.
Good – PayPal made $470m of revenue – up 35%
Not so good: Auctions (marketplaces) listings fell 5%, and GMV (the value of stuff that sells) rose only 14%. That’s a really low figure in this space.
and – signs of panic. eBay USA/Canada is reducing listing fees by 3% from now until November 5th. (50% if strt price is under $1).
This seems to go against their desire to reduce the amount of stagnant listings from huge sellers.
OSX Leopard: Top 10 reasons to upgrade or switch
The top ten cool new features in OSX Leopard – in ascending order. This is very much biased to my needs, so your mileage may vary.
1: Video Recording
Use Photo Booth to make movie clips. Capture those precious moments and send them to your friends in an email message. You can even choose a frame from your movie to use as your account picture or iChat buddy icon. [turns the built in camera into a cool toy]
2: Mail Data Detectors
Act on information in Mail immediately. Mail automatically detects text fragments like appointments and addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event. [I need to do this all the time]
3: DVD Player: Smoothly play back even DVDs that may be damaged. New technology in Leopard can locate and avoid scratched areas of the disc. [nice, but the DVD player is still region protected]
4: Grammar Check
Let your grammar set a shining example. A built-in English language grammar checker helps ensure that you don’t make errors in grammar. [this should work for writing blog entries]
5: Reopen Windows
Go back to a set of windows you were viewing after closing them or even after quitting Safari. [great if you close a tab or window by mistake]
6: Dictionary: Harness the power of Wikipedia when you’re connected to the Internet — built right into it’s Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results. [next step – Wikipedia on the mac offline ]
7: Preview: Easily remove the background from an image, leaving just the subject. Simply select Instant Alpha from the Tool Select button on the toolbar and click and drag in the area of the background you wish to remove. You can also use the Extract Shape tool to select a specific area of the image to keep, automatically excluding the rest. [super cool]
8: Address Book: View a detailed map of any address in Address Book. Just hold down the Control key while clicking any address and select “Map of” and Safari will show you its location in Google Maps [more great integration, and again something I will use a lot]
9: RSS
Subscribe to an RSS feed in Mail and you’ll know the moment an article or blog post hits the wire. Even better, you can choose to have new articles appear in your inbox. [this could transform things]
10: Back Up Everything
Automatic backup, built right into your Mac. Never worry about losing a file again. Time Machine stores an up-to-date copy of all your Mac’s files on an external hard drive, personal file sharing volume, or Mac OS X Server. That includes system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. [finally – it is here]
Lance Wiggs 