An article regarding proposed changes to regulate proxy advisers.
“Some of the outspoken critics against proxy advisers include billionaire retailer Solomon Lew.”
“Harvey Norman founder Gerry Harvey has been a critic of proxy advisers after they voted against the retiler’s remueration reports.”
With the likes or Lew and Harvey opposed to proxy advisers, then their roles are obviously very important.
Another article regarding the bottom-feeding banks.
Commonwealth Bank Credit Cards
Currently (until 30 June) they are offering special deals on some cards, such as waiving annual fees. Signed up for one last month, and before the end of the month received my first statement, which included the annual fee.
Raised this at the local branch, and they manually reversed it.
SO - it seems you have to be alert to this and personally raise it. Don’t expect the bank to fix it on their own initiative!
It is possible to get annual fees reversed if one approached their local branch for any credit card…if one says that if the card isn’t annual fee free they will close accounts and move elsewhere, often the branch manager will waive annual fees. I suspect that one of their KPIs may be total number of customers retained. It is worth taking advantage of. The cost to the bank is zip…but means a lot to the customer.
Which bank?
Oh. Those grubs once again.
Good on you. This is something that happens frequently, not just in banking, where promotions and specials are not actually implemented in back end systems which lag behind. It does take time to change computer systems. It does take time for processes to be communicated through an organisation.
Things like whether a card attracts an annual fee or not is just a simple flick of a setting in a database by an authorised staffer.
The Four Corners episode tonight should be interesting.
PayPal are now offering a PayPal Credit Card. Link this with their pay in 4 offer and another recipe for a possible debt disaster appears.
If you buy with no interest pay in 4 and then link the payments due to your PayPal Credit Card one could very likely be still paying interest and fees to PayPal.
It offers like many others a rewards scheme in that it has 1 point for $1 spent. Much like the other rewards schemes of others the points are probably only worth a tiny fraction of a cent each.
PayPal has a news release on this, it will only be positive in nature so should be read with filters in place (not rose tinted glasses).
All while Afterpay goes in the other direction
An article regarding more disgraceful conduct by CBA and other banks.
Which bank? Those same grubs again.
In this case, your pithy summary directly contradicts text in the article (and indeed directly contradicts the headline). Which bank? All four.
However dig a little deeper and you can see that the banks are really in a lose-lose situation. Blaming the banks may be culturally ingrained but it is at best a simplification.
Mr Klepec said financial institutions were being influenced by animal activists determined to shut down the live export trade.
“These minority groups have worked out how to manipulate the system and get what they want with their small voices to get a massive impact and the banks are going along with it, because they want to be seen as proactive in the ESG (environmental, social and governance) space,” he said.
What sort of grubs kowtow to the lunatic fringe?
I owe the Commonwealth Bank a partial apology. The annual fee was due to an error by me: I wanted to open a Low Fee Gold MasterCard account, but online I selected the Low Rate Gold MasterCard account by mistake. As a result I also unexpectedly incurred international transaction fees. This prompted another visit, and this bank officer immediately suspected that error, and set about arranging for it to be changed. Congratulations to that officer.
CBA offers 10 card options, and given the similar names I suspect others have been caught out too.
I wish there were no kowtowing but in my opinion reality is much more complicated than the above.
Choice is conducting a survey regarding insurance companies trying to extort money from renters.
"A new investigation has revealed that insurance companies are hounding renters to pay debts they do not owe.
Landlords pay insurance premiums to cover repairs and replacements in rented homes, but some insurance companies are sending renters the bill for damage they didn’t cause without the landlord even knowing – sometimes years after a claim has been paid.
CHOICE and WEstjustice have made a complaint to ASIC to investigate industry practices across landlord insurance and to assess where insurers have misled people or breached obligations to act fairly.
To help make our case, we need to show that this fails community standards for fairness. Will you take a moment to answer this quick poll?
Here are just some of the egregious cases we’ve put to the regulator:
It’s clear that some of the biggest insurance companies are banking on scaring renters into paying up, rather than accepting that they are responsible for paying landlord insurance claims. That’s what landlord insurance premiums should be paying for.
When CHOICE and WEstjustice approached insurers about these cases, many insurers dropped the claim. We know they’re sensitive to public backlash on this issue, so let’s make our voices heard. Take a moment to answer the poll now, so we can show insurers and ASIC where consumers stand.
Together for fairness,
Erin Turner
CHOICE"
Absolutely disgraceful behaviour.
Game on?
“While it may seem a bit rich for CBA to be crying foul over market power, it clearly sees the threat. And there is no way it or the other three majors will want to be relegated to a backroom role of providing vanilla packages to the tech giants.”
As Norm Gallagher said back in Whitlam’s era when Mainline Constructions went belly up in 1974.
“It couldn’t have happened to a greater pack of prize bastards”.
“NAB says 800 Citigroup employees will go over to the bank.”
What? To replace all the existing ones who are being retrenched as the Big 4 banks continue to close branches and outsource jobs?
How can you tell when a banker is lying?
Easy. You can see their lips moving.
Accepting Apple as your bank would be a bit “out of the frying pan into the fire”.
In my opinion, until the government mandates open standards for this kind of banking technology, it should be banned outright. Otherwise we know where the Apple / Google duopoly leads.
I would not consider using either Apple or Google for my banking.
I am merely laughing at the fact that after the many years of their disgusting behaviour, the Big 4 banks are now running scared and crying for protection from competition.
Poetic justice.
An interesting article we received today from our financial adviser regarding changes to share trading in Australia.
"The Blind Leading the Blind
On the 4th of August, CommSec, Australia’s largest online broker released a
statement. It began:The limits on trades without a cash deposit are changing from 04 September,
2021.In light of recent market volatility, CommSec is changing trading limits to help
protect our customers and minimise risk associated with investing and
settlement.
In the good old days, there was something known as T+3. You could buy a
stock and your broker would give you 3 days to settle the trade, i.e. come up
with the money. It provided an open window for retail traders to chance their
arm on buying a stock, hoping it went up and then selling out before having to
put down any money. If you were lucky and brave, you might have been able
to scalp a profit. More recently, the T+3 became T+2 as the ASX changed its
trading rules.
Same principle applied, but retail traders could still jump in and out of stocks
on a short-term basis without needing to have much (or any) cash in their
account. The more risk averse and experienced wouldn’t hold beyond the
trading day, lest they woke up to a surprise the next morning. A poor
announcement or a trading halt, which meant they couldn’t exit their position
and would have to stump up the capital.
The first few words of the second sentence of CommSec’s statement were
curious. Anyone who has been watching the market recently could tell you
volatility has been low, especially in the past two months, so to make this
change due to “recent market volatility” seemed strange. Unless you recall
Commonwealth Bank’s half year result from February.
CommSec, the bank’s brokerage service, added more than 230,000 new
users in the last six months alone as Australia experiences its own share of
market mania. Seven in ten of those are trading via the normal app or the
micro investment app CommSec Pocket, suggesting much of the growth is
being driven by a younger demographic.
Putting two and two together, it would seem some of these new users have
taken the opportunity to T+2 trade without having the money to settle. They’ve
likely been caught out by a poor announcement which left them heavily down,
or trading halt which left them unable to exit their position before settlement
date.
CommSec now wants more skin in the game. Prior to the
announcement, Commsec had a $25,000 limit without needing a deposit for
leading stocks (bigger/known) and $7,500 for non-leading stocks. They’ve cut
them to $5,000 and $1,000 limits respectively.
Occasionally, posts have appeared on social media investment groups, where
a panicked user asked what to do because they didn’t have money to clear a
trade that went against them. While some thought these posts were people
trying to wind the group up for attention, CommSec’s policy changes would
suggest they were truthful. Some played a dangerous game and were caught
with their pants around their ankles, and without the money to settle their
trades.
With the pandemic lockdown turning investing into a video game for new
entrants, it’s no surprise people have gotten themselves into trouble. The
suggestion is a lot of it’s coming from social media influencers egging the
naïve on. Something ASIC has some trouble dealing with, as noted when an
ASIC manager spoke to a recent conference.
“There’s a fragmented nature when we’re talking about social media and the
internet; there’s the scale of information that we have to monitor, there’s ease
of access to that information and the rapid churn rate – these are
considerations that make it a quite complex environment for us.”
“While social media can be okay as a means of getting background
information. Use your judgement and think about risks like the fact that advice
on social media may not be licensed, you might be getting information on
something that is inaccurate.”
And:
“Those providing it might have interests in the advice, they might be promoting
a certain product so that’s something to bear in mind.”
The Federal opposition was keen to weigh in on the matter, with Labor MP,
Julian Hill suggesting “Everyday Australians are being left to look to social media and TikTok
influencers,” and “the minister doesn’t think this is a problem as it is no
different to speaking to someone in the pub, but ASIC are concerned. These
‘influencers’ are taking kickbacks, that is what the Government is leaving
people to, and it is a return to the bad old days of commission.”
While it’s opportunistic from the opposition, especially as they’ve never been
friends of the professional advice community, the MP makes a good point.
The person in the pub talking about stocks previously had an audience of one
or two. Now some have an audience of several hundred thousand and it’s
often not clear if they’re partnered with a stock or investment service for
promotion.
More than ever it’s easy to get online and pose like an expert. If someone
gathers enough of a following, companies will want them to push their
products. Finding unbiased, common-sense information isn’t becoming any
easier.
Which brings us to a question posted to an online financial independence
forum recently. A person had concluded they and their partner were ready to
delegate their affairs to a financial adviser, so they asked how should they go
about finding one? How useful were the answers to their question? What
followed was the equivalent of an online pub brawl.
Without knowing a thing about the couple, several said they shouldn’t bother
working with an adviser and just do it themselves. Two people got into an
argument about active and index management, while others got into an
argument about investment platforms, with one claiming they were designed
to rip off clients – if only fraudster Melissa Caddick’s clients had known about
the value of having their funds with a verifiable third-party platform!
The person asking the question was likely more confused after reading
through the mess.
There’s never been so much freely available information, meaning information
has never been more valuable and worthless at the same time. The right
information – priceless. The rest? Not so much
Always consider the source"
