Strategic Issues in Financial Services Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Strategic Issues in Financial Services - Essay Example There are 13 banks that were involved in the annual JD Power and Associates Retail Banking Customer Satisfaction Survey (O'sullivan 2010, pp. 2). Out of these, the Cooperative Bank of England performed exemplarily and emerged tops. Abbey was rated as the worst bank in the UK. In addition, Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Clydesdale and Barclay’s banks were considered as performing below par. The National Building Society and RBS were the other banks that were considered as being best performers. The rating of the banks was done based on six distinct parameters. The ease of problem resolution, convenience to the customer, transactions, the offering of products like account openings, account statements and the fees that the bank charged were the six parameters used. The overall confidence in the banking sector is considered to have improved, this despite the fall of the Northern Rock as well as the recent credit crunch. The survey further stated that only a quarter of the respondents wou ld not recommend their bank to others and the same number believed that the stability of the banking sector had changed little. Despite the overwhelming support that the sector has regained in the last year, a sizeable number of the 3,300 respondents in the survey stated that the fees charged by their banks were the major factor for their withheld support. In the last couple of years, the credit crunch has negatively affected the performance of the banking sector with some international banks requiring bailout. The collapse of the sub-prime lending bubble led to a fallout that affected many banks globally. However, some banks managed the crisis considerably well, assisted by sound strategies. In this discussion, the focus is on the leaders and laggards that emerged from management of the economic crisis. The leader in the discussion will be the Cooperative Bank that was considered as the best bank in the UK by the JD Power and Associates survey. The same survey pit HSBC as performin g below average and this will be the laggard in the subsequent discussion. Formerly, people did not consider the extent of global integration. However, the multiple collapse of many institutions in the global scene presented a picture of how much integrated the world really is. Governments intervened with massive bailouts and other monetary regulations that were aimed at stabilizing the financial situation. As if to worsen matters, the effects were further strained by the recession that followed. It is in this background that the best strategies for survival and growth are tested. Both the Cooperative Bank and HSBC operated against this backdrop. What was regarded as the norm had to change drastically in order to guarantee business considering the mistrust that the crisis created. The Cooperative Bank was not spared. It made losses on its risky investments but the amount it made in losses cannot be equated to the amount that private banks like HSBC incurred (Cogan 2008, p. 7). The c haracteristics of the bank that made it suffer less involve the fact that its customers are also its members and are the ones that own it. The strength in this principle is that all approaches must be driven by consensus and are not reliant on a single stakeholder as is the case with HSBC. There is also a concomitant view that is for the long-term and also a stance that is risk-averse that allow the bank to be more conservative in terms of the strategy adopted towards retail banking. The Cooperative

Poverty in the United States Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Poverty in the United States - Research Paper Example This points us to one reality that no matter how rich and powerful a country is, its people would still experience inequality. In light of these facts, this essay will unravel the reasons of American poverty. At the end, it shall be providing a conclusion as to the state of poverty in the United States. Poverty in America In America, poverty status is ascertained by comparing the family’s yearly income â€Å"to a set of dollar values† commonly referred to as thresholds which may differ as to the size of the family, number of siblings and age of the householder (Bishaw and Macartney 1). According to a latest survey produced by the US Census Bureau, about fourteen percent (14%) of the people in the United States had incomes which fall below their respective poverty threshold (Bishaw and Macartney 1). This is to say that of the three hundred (300) million plus American people, nearly forty three (43) million are considered poor (Bishaw and Macartney 1). Although this numbe r is quite small compared to other nations, it is relevant to know the reason of this turn out as it poses a great challenge to the American government. Actually, it has been noted that America’s poverty rate has increased substantially from the year 2008 to 2009. The increase is considered to be the highest since 1994 (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 14). Out of the fifty (50) states making up the United States of America, thirty-one (31) states have observed a constant rise of their poverty rate (Bishaw and Macartney 1). This finding is somehow alarming knowing that the American government has been active in fighting poverty in almost all of its sectors. Also, America has been known for its welfare system. Under this particular system, assistance in the form of money or free service is given to the poor and needy within the American society (â€Å"US Welfare†). Relevantly, most of the poor people in US are Hispanics or Latinos (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 14). To note, the Latinos in the country are actually immigrants. These immigrants are known to be having a hard time finding an employment. As a result, many of them do not have enough resource to support their existence. If this situation will persist, it could be stated then, that the American government has failed to address the social problem and that its program aimed to alleviate poverty has not been effective. Causes of American Poverty In 2001, a poll was conducted to know the sentiments of the American people with regard to the existence of poverty in their country (Iceland 70). In this survey, the respondents were asked of their opinion with regard to the bigger cause of poverty in America today. They were to choose any of the two options: (1) â€Å"that people are not doing enough to help themselves out of poverty or† (2) â€Å"that circumstances beyond their control cause them to be poor† (Iceland 70). The first option of course puts the blame to the person him self or herself. This is to say that it is his or her personal decisions or choices in life which made him or her poor. The second option on the other hand implies that there are external factors which cause the person to be poor. It could be due to the policies of the government or cultural issues. Significantly, the responses of the respondents were closely evenly split. Forty-eight (48) percent have chosen the first cause while forty-five (45)

Symbolism in The Bean Trees and Medicine River by Barbara Kingsolver Essay

Symbolism in The Bean Trees and Medicine River by Barbara Kingsolver - Essay Example She has shown innate qualities of a writer by relating to people, their plight and the situations that they get into because of the dominant society. Not only this, Barbara King also has a feel and the place for non-living objects that she so beautifully exploits to express her abstract ideas. Another novel that could be spoken about here in Medicine River by Thomas King, who too used symbols, such as people, nature, and other objects in a similar way too represent his ideas and understanding of life in general. An essay so deemed to be worthy enough for comparing the two of the most followed literature works will demonstrate how both Barbara Kingsolver and Thomas King used people, objects, and nature to bring out different meanings and ideas in their literary work. Barbara Kingsolver wrote ‘The Bean Trees’ focusing on the life of people living I low profiled cities like that of Kentucky and her prime character was the young woman named Taylor Greer. Tired of Male domina nce, she decided to head to the west in search of an ideal place that could get her away from chauvinistic nature of the society. In her journey to find solace, she met across people from several ethnicities and she also acquired a little native Indian child. The novel so intrinsically identifies and makes you feel for the original and tough experiences of the core character, Taylor Greer; her experiences through different symbols of friendship, belonging, support, and life get you to relate to some or the other incidences of life. Medicine River written by Thomas King revolves around Will, who is a Photographer by profession. Even though he thinks that he has come back to his home town of Medicine River for the rituals of her mother’s demise, he not only gets caught up in helping the community and the natives, but also manages to fall in love with a girl at the same time. Thomas King has used different symbols to demonstrate the same meanings of friendship, belongingness, su pport, and life through out the story. Both the novels center on the core theme of humanity, whether from the perspective of friends or from some one who is just a well-wisher. However, the symbolism all the more has been so dramatized that it looks nothing far from real with characters ending up meeting just when they were being expected by the readers. Lou Ann of ‘The Bean Trees’ and Harlen of ‘Medicine River’ form an intrinsic part of the novel as both have been presented as the best friends and companions of Taylor Greer and Will respectively. The characters have been so enlivened in the story that the reader can’t stop thinking about his own life experiences and remembering incidences of meeting people who played similar roles in their life to such characters. They add twists and a touch of practicality to the novel’s idea by giving it a touch of real life experiences. "Harlen Bigbear was one of the most charitable people I had ever known . No matter whom it was, Harlen would always go looking for the good in a person. And even if he couldn't find it, he assumed that it was there, buried somewhere." Harlen’s character is so presented in Medicine River that she always prefers to gossip about things that happen around in the society, especially in her community and advise Will about the good and the bad. Will enjoys her company and association even though she is mostly annoyed while talking and discussing. She often did things that even though might be not in so favor of Will’s opinion; he could sense an attachment that makes him feel good about the occasion. On the other hand, Lou Ann in ‘The Bean Trees’

Customer Relationship Management For The Birmingham New Library Essay

Customer Relationship Management For The Birmingham New Library - Essay Example These strategies are vital for assessing both the internal and external environments, which are favourable or unfavourable to the successful business activities. The researcher incorporated varied marketing strategies vital for enabling the Birmingham Library to accomplish their goals successfully. The researcher provided varied recommendations which the company should take into considerations in order to achieve successful business performance. The action plan was formulated that attempted to reveal the way the objectives of the company will be achieved. Lastly, the conclusion was included that provided a concise summary of the market report. Customer Relationship Management for the Birmingham New Library Introduction The customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved as an effective approach for enabling companies to interact with their customers effectively in order to achieve their business goals successfully. CRM is a business strategy that enables the company to understand the needs of the clients, retain customers through customer experience, reduce management costs and increase profitability (Kangal, 201, p. 45). Senn, Thoma andYip (2013, p.28) defines CRM strategy as the management process accountable for predicting, identifying customers and satisfying their demanding needs for shared benefit. The CRM strategy integrates sales, services, technology solutions; thus it attempts to bring together every part of the business, which touches the client in order to achieve effective business organizational performance. The Birmingham Library is a new library, which is under construction in the Birmingham centre in England; thus employing effective strategy will enable the company to achieve their intended goals. Therefore, employing CRM strategy will be an effective means that will enable the company to assign, create and manage customer requests; thus contributing to effective business performance. The Birmingham Library will employ CRM strategy because this approach often integrates social media services in order to communicate, share customer opinions and experiences; thereby, building up successful customer relationship. Key Objectives The market report aims to examine the marketing strategies vital for increasing performance in the Birmingham Library. It analyses the internal and external factors that may

Human Resource Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 4

Human Resource Management - Essay Example Focus The focus of this paper will be on the effect of environmental factors on the HRM systems utilized for employee resourcing and talent management in an organisation in the U.K. Organizations do not work in a vacuum and have to rely on cues from the external environment to decide where the company is headed and the kind of talent it needs to take it there. While the environment can prove favourable at times, it can also drastically and negatively affect company business; consequently, having an understanding on how to deal with these, from an HRM point of view, is very important. Employee Resourcing and Talent Management: Analysis and Significance For the purpose of this essay, the chosen system is the Employee resourcing and talent management system of HR. Identifying new resource and hiring it happens to be the most basic function of any HR manager in any organization, irrespective of size and scale of operations. A more advanced but still extremely crucial level of HRM is the management of that talent and utilizing it in such a way so as to maximize overall output and efficiency. Unemployed talent represents people who are living within the same external environment of the organization and are experiencing similar pressures but are not a component of the internal culture and environment of the company. ... External environmental influences and their impact on HRM systems and service delivery there are many influences that affect HR decision making and strategy. A detailed analysis of the external ones is given below: Political The government has been making deliberate attempts at curtailing the influx of foreighners into the U.K. – whether as workers or as immigrants. Fluendy (2011) comments on the great demand for foreigners in the U.K. for the fields of IT, engineering and accountancy, as well as in nursing and technicians. The government has been openly and sometimes surreptitiously implementing laws that discourage people from hiring workers from outside. The policy on immigration here has not been as it is implemented in other countries, with its aim since the 1960s to limit provision of U.K. citizenship and acclimatizing immigrants already present in the country (Boswell 2008). Despite that, more than 2 million immigrants have come and settled in the U.K. in the past decad e or so. Job creation, unfortunately, has not been able to match this influx. These affect directly the labour market and thus the resourcing needs of HRM. Legal The stock market crash has instigated investigation into the effectiveness of the Financial Services Authority. Of late, insider dealing has been banned in the U.K., says Barnes (2010). Furthermore, discrimination control laws are in place. In late 2010, the Equality Act 2010 was implemented which is aimed at harmonising all existing anti-discrimination legislation (Davies 2010). With the labour market an amalgamation of so many nationals, HR needs to be well cognisant of the law for proper talent

A comparison of CORBA and Web Services Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

A comparison of CORBA and Web Services - Essay Example Distributed Applications refer to the applications which can be distributed across different processors and computer systems.This concept helps in deploying an application across systems on a network which might be working a common project or an application. Distribution introduces a whole new set of semantics for ease of computing; some applications by their very nature are distributed across multiple computers because of one or more of the following reasons (Chaffee & martin, 1999):There are some applications which might need to access common data. Therefore, the data which these applications must access must necessarily be residing on multiple systems for administration and ownership reasons. There are several options available with distributed applications like an owner could permit the accessibility of the data-the data might be permitted to be accessed remotely but not stored on the local systems. If the data cannot be co-located, it must necessarily exist on multiple heterogen eous systems. Many applications in particular make the use of multiple processors in parallel computing to run an application and to solve a problem. Other applications may execute on multiple computers in order to take advantage of some unique feature of a particular system. Distributed applications most definitely take advantage of the scalability and heterogeneity of the distributed system (Chaffee & Martin, 1999). Some applications execute on multiple computers because users of the application communicate and interact with each other via the application. Each user executes a piece of the distributed application on his or her computer, and shared objects, typically execute on one or more servers. A typical architecture for this kind of application is illustrated below. Fig 1: Distributed Applications (Chaffee & Martin, 1999) It is necessary for the Distributed application developers to address several issues in a local program where in one operating system process all logic is executed. There are some differences between the objects that are co-located in the same process and the objects that can interact across processes or machine boundaries. The objects that are co-located can communicate faster than the ones that run on distributed applications. When in a group of objects which are co-located, one object fails, the whole of the object group fails. However, in the distributed applications, if one object among the whole bunch of objects running fails, it will not affect the other objects. Also the networks can be partitioned so as to separate the objects into different domains. Concurrent access in co-located objects is possible only through multiple threads. Concurrent access among the objects is possible in objects running in the distributed applications. Co-located objects are totally secure which i s evident through the fact that objects have access only among themselves and any other outer objects cannot access that group of objects. Objects in a distributed application environment are not secure since objects in such an environment are not protected against access from other processes. The communication speeds between the objects belonging to the same process are much higher when compared to the communication speeds between objects located on different machines. This statement implies that distributed applications which most probably might contain more than two objects having tight interactions should not be designed. If such applications are designed, the objects should be co-located to enhance the performance and the communication speeds. When two objects are co-located, they fail together; if the process in which they execute fails, both objects fail. The

Central Banks and Monetary Policy Essay Example for Free

Central Banks and Monetary Policy Essay In order to fully understand the nature of monetary policy, there is a need to define the function of money. According to economists, the general functions of money are as follows: 1) measure of goods and services, 2) standard of value, 3) medium of exchange, 4) storage of wealth, and 5) speculative function (related to contingency). In a very simple economy, efficiency can be achieved through general exchanges of goods and services. Every family unit or community specializes in the production of one commodity. Goods are exchanged through what economists call ‘barter system. ’ As the community grows, transactions within the simple economy become more and more complicated. There is a need to utilize a new medium of exchange. Money, whatever its earliest forms were, serves as the new medium of exchange, reducing bulkiness and inefficiency in the economy. At some point in time, the quantity of money circulating in this economy increases. This leads to rising price levels of goods and services. As the quantity of money circulating in an economy increases, price levels of goods and services also increase (inflation). The institution tasked to maintain the monetary health of an economy is the central bank. The main functions of central banks are as follows: 1)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   To regulate price levels in an economy by increasing or decreasing the supply of money circulating in an economy; 2)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   To provide a manageable amount of credit in an economy (serves as a stimulus to increased investments); 3)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   To regulate or control exchange rates (in countries where currencies are on a non-floating status); 4)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   To determine equilibrium interest rates (here monetary policy is directly related to fiscal policy, or more accurately interest rates nominally determine consumption levels, supply of money, and investment levels); 5)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   To provide financial/monetary information to businesses and households (central banks report on the general status/health of an economy). The main function of central bank can be summed up as follows: if the general price levels in an economy increases, central banks decreases money supply; if the price levels decreases, central banks increases the supply of money (secondary money markets). Interest rates are also adjusted based on investment, consumption, and government expenditure patterns. When central banks sells bonds and securities, the monetary base of an economy contracts. When central banks buy bonds and securities (in capital markets), the monetary base of an economy expands. Through this process of adjustment/readjustment, central banks are able to regulate financial transactions in an economy. In recent years, the US economy experiences relative decrease in overall national output. Fiscal policies are directed to decrease equilibrium interest rate to encourage increased consumption, investment, and government expenditure (increasing output in the long-run). As of the present, the Federal Reserve monetary policy is directed to: 1) increasing the supply of money in the US economy (Federal Funds Rate), and 2) increasing the flow of credit (provide households and businesses with increased volatile funds). According to the recent Federal Reserve Report, there are indications that the US economy continues to contract. Household spending has shown signs of stabilization but gravely constrained by job losses, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Overall sales and demand for manufactures continue to decline. There are also signs that inflation could persist for a time. To counter these economic difficulties, the Committee of the Federal Reserve will maintain the target range for the fed funds rate at 0 to 25%. To increase the money supply in the US economy (to prevent contraction), the Federal Reserve will buy a total of $1.25 trillion of agency-backed securities. At autumn, the Federal Reserve will purchase about $300 billion of treasury securities as a form of credit collateral. Note that the Federal Reserve is increasing the monetary base of the US economy by purchasing securities and treasuries. What are the general effects of monetary policy on production and employment? Suppose that the economy is in the process of contraction (not to be confused with the monetary base). The central bank has two complimentary options: decreasing the nominal interest rate and increasing the money supply. An increase in both the interest rate and the money supply would increase aggregate demand. This will shift the aggregate demand to the right, indicating a higher national output. On the supply side, this will induce firms to decrease their supply of goods to the market; indicating a leftward shift of the aggregate supply. Depending on the strength of income and substitution effect, the increase in national output via the aggregate demand may be higher or lower than the decrease in output via the supply side. In short, a monetary policy only serves to maintain the stability of an economy.