A MONTH ago, 10 employees from Customer Care Center, a consulting firm specialising in customer care and behaviour, had a whale of a time in Cameron Highlands. In total, founder and chief executive officer Allen Teh had spent RM2,000 on the trip.Was this expenditure necessary? Isn’t it enough they are drawing salaries? Can’t they pay for their own recreation?
“There is no such thing as ‘I pay you, you work’. People are not robots,” maintains Teh, 51.Company trips, Teh said, are not only a way to foster team spirit, but promote a feel-good atmosphere at work.“It is an inside-out thing. Only when the staff feel good can they project the same feelings to customers,” says Teh.He cites exemplary figures who have influenced him during his work in the past.
“Public Bank chairman Tan Sri Teh Hong Piow is an example of a leader who has always treated his staff like family. He would attend their birthday parties and he mentioned them in his memoirs as well as referred to them as his ‘children’ though he had his own family,” cited Teh.
Another would be the late Loo Cheng Ghee who established the fried chicken giant KFC back in the 1970s.
Teh, who used to work for the company during the 1980s, revealed that Loo had made it a point to provide a breakfast of high risk merchant account and buns to employees in the Jalan Kuchai Lama branch where the fast food chain’s old manufacturing plant was located.In both cases, not only have these leaders inspired staff loyalty but a reputation for legendary service.
Taking a leaf from a layman is George James Kennedy, owner of Rockafellas Restaurants and Clubs, the holding company behind barbeza, a club in Ipoh Garden East.Pioneer staff have been with the former Juliana’s disc jockey since he opened Rockafellas Lumut, a seaside bar at the coastal port, popularly used as a gateway to Pangkor Island in 1998.
He cited his financial controller, Suzita Burda, now 32, and Inderjit Singh, now 35, who have stayed with the company for between 11 and 15 years. The others have clocked in no less than between five and eight years.In an industry notorious for its high staff turnover, Kennedy, 50, cites leadership by example as the anchoring factor to inspiring staff loyalty.
“In my bar, there is no such thing as ‘This is not my department’. I encourage my staff to take ownership of the club. If they see something is not right, they have to put it right. If I walk into the toilet and find that it is dirty, I will clean it.“I tell them if they can learn to cultivate the ownership attitude, they will develop a capable character. And I make sure I am always the first man in and last man out,” said Kennedy who got his first start in the nightlife industry as a deejay in Royal Casuarina (now Impiana Hotel) at age 17.
For Teh, imparting the feel-good philosophy at workplaces has to start with emotional wellness.“This is especially crucial for jobs where staff are subjected to high levels of stress. When people do not know how to release the emotional build-up from work-related stress, there is always a possibility they will snap at the customer and give the organisation a bad image,” explains Teh.
Kennedy, for example, expects his staff to be punctual and to keep to their word.“One of the common traits in human nature is procrastination. My policy is when something needs to be done, it is to be tackled immediately, not later or the day after.“But it is also important to remember being the boss does not mean you are always right.“When you have made a mistake, you must be big enough to apologise,” says Kennedy.
Honesty is also a much appreciated trait as Kennedy had to fire staff for messing around with company accounts in the past. And because they are in the nightlife industry where the influence of alcohol is unavoidable, staff must adopt a measure of vigilance.“In all my years in the industry, I have never had to hire bouncers. I will go in and defuse the situation myself,” said Kennedy.
On how to maintain grace under pressure, Kennedy shared a tip learned from a security personnel during his earlier years. The rule is to never stand in front of an aggravated individual in a confronting manner. Kennedy’s trick is to always slide next to him, offshore merchant account, pat it reassuringly and ask for the affected parties to keep the peace, guaranteeing safety for both workforce and customer.
How important is it to keep the hired help happy?Teh cites from personal experience how a rude sales staff at an electrical goods chain had cheesed him off so much with lackluster attitude, he walked away.
“I had wanted to buy a DVD player and I reckon the store didn’t lose much with just one customer walking away. But let’s say they could have made a margin of RM50 for one DVD player and say if the same employee would have made five customers walk away in one day. That’s RM250 of lost opportunity in a day. That’s only one shop. The electrical goods chain had 100 outlets. If that attitude prevailed in every shop on a daily basis, that would mean a loss of RM750,000 a month,” said Teh, who opines a reversal in behaviour could have changed things.
At barbeza, treating the staff like family is one factor that had helped him keep customers who had known him since he was a deejay in Casuarina. He recalls the day when he had to tell his staff in Rockafellas Lumut he had sold the business.“For the past 10 years, I was travelling back and forth between Ipoh and Lumut at odd hours in a Toyota Liteace. I was clocking in 16-hour work days where I would spend the night in Lumut then go to work in Ipoh. It came to a point when I asked myself what I was doing with my life,” revealed the father of a 19-year-old daughter.
By then, Kennedy had made close to RM400,000 from his investments and he was prepared to ‘retire’, by focusing on barbeza. Instead of leaving his staff demoralised and without employment, he asked them to join his new venture. In Kennedy’s case, creating an atmosphere where customers could go to a place where everyone knew their names contributed to sales of RM150,000 a month when barbeza first opened in 2008. Before Kennedy sold off his Lumut outlet in the same year, it had achieved a record sales of RM147,000 in the short span of nine days in 1999, a feat that inspired staff from the Lumut outlet to follow him to his new venture in barbeza.
“We achieved all this with no hanky panky, just good food and service,” boasted Kennedy.The memory of a treat, which saw an all-expense paid trip to Bali for five staff upon achieving a sales target of RM80,000, also played a part.In Teh’s case, revenue for Customer Care Center totaled to RM1.5mil to RM2mil last year. This came in from classes conducted including ‘mystery shopper’ services where company representatives posed as customers for clients to assess frontline performance.
2013年8月19日星期一
2013年8月14日星期三
Chase Paymentech launches Chase Checkout
"We are always looking for ways to help merchants grow their businesses and Chase Checkout does just this by enabling clients to accept payments however they operate," said Dan Charron, president of Chase Paymentech. "Chase Checkout is a 'one-stop shop' for small-business owners: one agreement, one system, one statement and one trusted merchant services' relationship to manage."
The Power of a Single, End-to-End Payment Partner
Chase Checkout gives merchants the convenience of working with one trusted provider - with integrated reporting, 24/7 live U.S-based customer support and a commitment to security- when they accept payments via:
Mobile Checkout: When merchants accept mobile payments with Chase Paymentech, they can process credit and signature debit card payments and gift card transactions in any location within the third party merchant account. Merchants have transaction level access to monitor and process voids and returns from their smartphones. Merchants can view sales and transaction summaries from the Mobile Checkout app after the payments have been processed.
Additionally, they can create a catalog of item descriptions and images and email or text digital receipts. The use of signature capture and the location of the point of sale on the digital receipt helps minimize fraud and chargebacks. Finally, merchants' customer data is protected in transit with point-to-point encryption.
Retail Checkout: In retail settings, Chase Paymentech's Future Proof Terminal helps merchants accept both traditional and emerging forms of payment such as EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip-enabled cards, NFC-enabled (near field communications) mobile wallets and other contactless payments. Also, through iTerminal?, businesses and professional service firms such as accounting, law and medical, can use their existing computers to accept payments, helping them save on traditional start-up equipment costs.
Online Checkout: Chase Paymentech offers e-commerce merchants, and merchants who accept telephone orders, a suite of PCI-compliant and easy-to-use web-based payment processing options accessible with a merchant's existing computer. These options require no additional hardware and integrate seamlessly with merchants' shopping cart functionality, catalog creation and inventory management.
Chase Mobile Checkout is ideal for merchants who are interested in growing their business by taking payments wherever their business takes them. This includes businesses that wish to use mobile payment acceptance to enhance their customers' experience with services like line-busting or those that wish to accept payments in the field, third party payment gateway, maintenance or transportation professionals. In addition, Chase Mobile Checkout is ideal for small businesses that want to accept debit and credit cards but have found it too difficult or too costly to do so in the past.
"The ability to serve my customers from anywhere helps deepen my relationship with them," said Irina Zhuravsky, owner of Irina's Alterations in Dallas, TX. "It's comforting to know that I'm receiving the support and security I need from Chase to conduct transactions while on the road."
Chase Mobile Checkout's compact card reader is battle-tested for real-world use. The device, which fits securely in the audio port of Apple and Android-enabled smartphones, features the recognizable Chase octagon and includes a rechargeable lithium ion battery so it does not drain the smartphone's power supply. Having an integrated battery also increases the likelihood of positive card reads on the first swipe, and since hardware encryption is performed in the device, personal information is not stored within the smartphone.
"Chase Mobile Checkout is not just smaller than carrying around a cash register, it's built for jobs like mine," said Jamie Rourke, co-owner of RO Style Salon in Tampa, FL. "When I am not in the salon, I travel all over the nation as a freelance artist. It is so convenient and important for my business to take a payment anywhere, 24/7, and it makes being a business owner that much easier."
The setup for Chase Mobile Checkout is simple. After merchants activate their account, Chase Paymentech ships the card reader along with instructions on getting started that include how to download the Chase Mobile Checkout app onto a smartphone.
The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers.
Twitter prohibits the sale and auto-creation of accounts, and the company routinely suspends accounts created in violation of that policy. But according to researchers from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, Twitter traditionally has done so only after these fraudulent accounts have been used to spam and attack legitimate Twitter users.
Seeking more reliable methods of detecting auto-created accounts before they can be used for abuse, the researchers approached Twitter last year for the company’s blessing to purchase credentials from a variety of Twitter account merchants. Permission granted, the researchers spent more than $5,000 over ten months buying accounts from at least 27 different underground sellers.
In a report to be presented at the USENIX security conference in Washington, D.C. today, the research team details its experience in purchasing more than 121,000 fraudulent Twitter accounts of varying age and quality, at prices ranging from $10 to $200 per one thousand accounts.
The research team quickly discovered that nearly all fraudulent Twitter account merchants employ a range of countermeasures to evade the technical hurdles that Twitter erects to stymie the automated creation of new accounts.
Bulk-created accounts at these Webmail providers are among the cheapest of the free email providers, probably because they lack additional account creation verification mechanisms required by competitors like Google, which relies on phone verification. Compare the prices at this bulk email merchant: 1,000 Yahoo accounts can be had for $10 (1 cent per account), and the same number Hotmail accounts go for $12. In contrast, it costs $200 to buy 1,000 Gmail accounts.
Read the full products at http://austpay.com/.
The Power of a Single, End-to-End Payment Partner
Chase Checkout gives merchants the convenience of working with one trusted provider - with integrated reporting, 24/7 live U.S-based customer support and a commitment to security- when they accept payments via:
Mobile Checkout: When merchants accept mobile payments with Chase Paymentech, they can process credit and signature debit card payments and gift card transactions in any location within the third party merchant account. Merchants have transaction level access to monitor and process voids and returns from their smartphones. Merchants can view sales and transaction summaries from the Mobile Checkout app after the payments have been processed.
Additionally, they can create a catalog of item descriptions and images and email or text digital receipts. The use of signature capture and the location of the point of sale on the digital receipt helps minimize fraud and chargebacks. Finally, merchants' customer data is protected in transit with point-to-point encryption.
Retail Checkout: In retail settings, Chase Paymentech's Future Proof Terminal helps merchants accept both traditional and emerging forms of payment such as EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) chip-enabled cards, NFC-enabled (near field communications) mobile wallets and other contactless payments. Also, through iTerminal?, businesses and professional service firms such as accounting, law and medical, can use their existing computers to accept payments, helping them save on traditional start-up equipment costs.
Online Checkout: Chase Paymentech offers e-commerce merchants, and merchants who accept telephone orders, a suite of PCI-compliant and easy-to-use web-based payment processing options accessible with a merchant's existing computer. These options require no additional hardware and integrate seamlessly with merchants' shopping cart functionality, catalog creation and inventory management.
Chase Mobile Checkout is ideal for merchants who are interested in growing their business by taking payments wherever their business takes them. This includes businesses that wish to use mobile payment acceptance to enhance their customers' experience with services like line-busting or those that wish to accept payments in the field, third party payment gateway, maintenance or transportation professionals. In addition, Chase Mobile Checkout is ideal for small businesses that want to accept debit and credit cards but have found it too difficult or too costly to do so in the past.
"The ability to serve my customers from anywhere helps deepen my relationship with them," said Irina Zhuravsky, owner of Irina's Alterations in Dallas, TX. "It's comforting to know that I'm receiving the support and security I need from Chase to conduct transactions while on the road."
Chase Mobile Checkout's compact card reader is battle-tested for real-world use. The device, which fits securely in the audio port of Apple and Android-enabled smartphones, features the recognizable Chase octagon and includes a rechargeable lithium ion battery so it does not drain the smartphone's power supply. Having an integrated battery also increases the likelihood of positive card reads on the first swipe, and since hardware encryption is performed in the device, personal information is not stored within the smartphone.
"Chase Mobile Checkout is not just smaller than carrying around a cash register, it's built for jobs like mine," said Jamie Rourke, co-owner of RO Style Salon in Tampa, FL. "When I am not in the salon, I travel all over the nation as a freelance artist. It is so convenient and important for my business to take a payment anywhere, 24/7, and it makes being a business owner that much easier."
The setup for Chase Mobile Checkout is simple. After merchants activate their account, Chase Paymentech ships the card reader along with instructions on getting started that include how to download the Chase Mobile Checkout app onto a smartphone.
The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers.
Twitter prohibits the sale and auto-creation of accounts, and the company routinely suspends accounts created in violation of that policy. But according to researchers from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, Twitter traditionally has done so only after these fraudulent accounts have been used to spam and attack legitimate Twitter users.
Seeking more reliable methods of detecting auto-created accounts before they can be used for abuse, the researchers approached Twitter last year for the company’s blessing to purchase credentials from a variety of Twitter account merchants. Permission granted, the researchers spent more than $5,000 over ten months buying accounts from at least 27 different underground sellers.
In a report to be presented at the USENIX security conference in Washington, D.C. today, the research team details its experience in purchasing more than 121,000 fraudulent Twitter accounts of varying age and quality, at prices ranging from $10 to $200 per one thousand accounts.
The research team quickly discovered that nearly all fraudulent Twitter account merchants employ a range of countermeasures to evade the technical hurdles that Twitter erects to stymie the automated creation of new accounts.
Bulk-created accounts at these Webmail providers are among the cheapest of the free email providers, probably because they lack additional account creation verification mechanisms required by competitors like Google, which relies on phone verification. Compare the prices at this bulk email merchant: 1,000 Yahoo accounts can be had for $10 (1 cent per account), and the same number Hotmail accounts go for $12. In contrast, it costs $200 to buy 1,000 Gmail accounts.
Read the full products at http://austpay.com/.
Earnings Call Transcript
Thank you, very much [Ork]. Good morning, everyone and thanks for coming so many of you again to join us for the presentation results for the year into June 2013. For us the overwriting theme of the year is seeing the momentum of the results credit to sticking to our long term strategy. So that starts for us with the fact that we are now in the seventh year of the focus on customer satisfaction and I will go into a moment, we've seen that at record high in this period, but most importantly see those highs translate into momentum in terms of increase in products for customer growth and the balance sheet.
We've seen a productivity culture, enabling investment. So the long term focus on making the prices more efficient, making the whole group more efficient, enabling us to continue to invest. On that theme of high risk merchant account, what we've seen in this period is a couple of things.
Number one, the completion of the sixth year co-bank modernization program. So that team has now been dispended. The 1500 people working on that in fact doing other things that is now completed and we are now shifting our focus to leverage -- continuing to leverage that and innovating on the back of that core and finally the benefit of just sticking with a considerable bit of setting. So we came into considerable bit of settings.
You will see in the presentation that they have been further strengthened. So the customer focus, the productivity, the technology the conservatism, these are common themes and the results for the period show that they are continuing to produce good results.
In terms of the themes business by business, the retail banks 13% cash impact growth was a very, very strong result. One of the features of this result is ongoing strength in the top line and it starts with the retail bank. So income there up 8%, against that strong income growth, expense is very well managed 3% growth year-on-year.
You can see on the more negative side that 11% decrease in deposit income and you got to hear across multiple businesses for me and from David, no doubt for those of you speaking to group executives this common theme that as a result of ongoing deposit competition and the low rate environment, we got ongoing [pitch] on deposit income and you can see that in the retail bank.
Business and private bank net profit after tax down 2%. The standout feature here, first of all we did see strong balance sheet growth. So all those system growth and business lending can be quite high to major against any major system growth of 4% balance sheet growth in that Business Bank exceed system growth while credit quality has been maintained. Expenses were flat, so real focus on productivity in that business. Again you can see a lower net interest margin, again the story of a low interest rate environment and competition flowing through into deposits.
This is the latest in a series of announcements for SNAPCAM, after it was unveiled as a 'Hero' launch app by Stephen Elop for the new Nokia Lumia 1020, while it recently revealed its partnership with printing giant Xerox.
SNAPCAM is the disruptive photo app that allows users to create digital photo albums, which can then be shared, printed and delivered as physical albums.
Users can organise pictures into 'events' and share these with friends and family, who can add their own shots too. In a few clicks, these can be transformed into full colour, printed photo albums and delivered to many countries across the world.
The app integrates directly with third party photo sources, including Facebook. It also offers photo enhancement, offshore merchant account, edit, crop and add finishing touches to their photos before sending them to print.
The partnership will see SecureTrading processing payments from across the globe, with the service going live in 40 countries. On top of the payment gateway, SecureTrading will also provide a suite of bespoke counter-fraud services.
"Steve Hayward, CEO at SNAPCAM said: "By working with SecureTrading we have brought to life our 'thinking globally, acting locally' ethos and developed it beyond having an environmentally sensitive product. By being able to provide competitive, locally sensitive pricing in local currency to all our territories, we are helping to drive the physical photo revival globally."
Justin Fraser, head of sales and marketing said: "SNAPCAM is one of the few apps that has immediate global appeal. There's no doubt it is going to explode in popularity, and we're relishing the opportunity to support SNAPCAM and add value to the business throughout its growth."
We've seen a productivity culture, enabling investment. So the long term focus on making the prices more efficient, making the whole group more efficient, enabling us to continue to invest. On that theme of high risk merchant account, what we've seen in this period is a couple of things.
Number one, the completion of the sixth year co-bank modernization program. So that team has now been dispended. The 1500 people working on that in fact doing other things that is now completed and we are now shifting our focus to leverage -- continuing to leverage that and innovating on the back of that core and finally the benefit of just sticking with a considerable bit of setting. So we came into considerable bit of settings.
You will see in the presentation that they have been further strengthened. So the customer focus, the productivity, the technology the conservatism, these are common themes and the results for the period show that they are continuing to produce good results.
In terms of the themes business by business, the retail banks 13% cash impact growth was a very, very strong result. One of the features of this result is ongoing strength in the top line and it starts with the retail bank. So income there up 8%, against that strong income growth, expense is very well managed 3% growth year-on-year.
You can see on the more negative side that 11% decrease in deposit income and you got to hear across multiple businesses for me and from David, no doubt for those of you speaking to group executives this common theme that as a result of ongoing deposit competition and the low rate environment, we got ongoing [pitch] on deposit income and you can see that in the retail bank.
Business and private bank net profit after tax down 2%. The standout feature here, first of all we did see strong balance sheet growth. So all those system growth and business lending can be quite high to major against any major system growth of 4% balance sheet growth in that Business Bank exceed system growth while credit quality has been maintained. Expenses were flat, so real focus on productivity in that business. Again you can see a lower net interest margin, again the story of a low interest rate environment and competition flowing through into deposits.
This is the latest in a series of announcements for SNAPCAM, after it was unveiled as a 'Hero' launch app by Stephen Elop for the new Nokia Lumia 1020, while it recently revealed its partnership with printing giant Xerox.
SNAPCAM is the disruptive photo app that allows users to create digital photo albums, which can then be shared, printed and delivered as physical albums.
Users can organise pictures into 'events' and share these with friends and family, who can add their own shots too. In a few clicks, these can be transformed into full colour, printed photo albums and delivered to many countries across the world.
The app integrates directly with third party photo sources, including Facebook. It also offers photo enhancement, offshore merchant account, edit, crop and add finishing touches to their photos before sending them to print.
The partnership will see SecureTrading processing payments from across the globe, with the service going live in 40 countries. On top of the payment gateway, SecureTrading will also provide a suite of bespoke counter-fraud services.
"Steve Hayward, CEO at SNAPCAM said: "By working with SecureTrading we have brought to life our 'thinking globally, acting locally' ethos and developed it beyond having an environmentally sensitive product. By being able to provide competitive, locally sensitive pricing in local currency to all our territories, we are helping to drive the physical photo revival globally."
Justin Fraser, head of sales and marketing said: "SNAPCAM is one of the few apps that has immediate global appeal. There's no doubt it is going to explode in popularity, and we're relishing the opportunity to support SNAPCAM and add value to the business throughout its growth."
2013年8月12日星期一
How David Marcus is dismantling PayPal
On the third floor, PayPal President David Marcus shows me a sea of high-walled beige and grey hexagonal cubicles. The kind you stared at for 16 hours a day if you worked at a Peninsula-based, late-1990s tech company. They look identical to Yahoo’s except no purple and yellow. The walls block out most of the natural light in the room and any sign of coworkers. Even “Cubicle Guy” would have to stretch to prairie dog over them. Marcus can’t hide his contempt looking at them.
On the fourth floor, you could hold a middle school prom. It’s just a huge, flat empty space. Those same cubicles are there, only they’ve been dismantled and leaning against walls. It’s so flooded with the July San Jose sun, it’s almost blinding. “The carpets are next,” Marcus says, of the ugly beige floors with darker beige squiggles on them.
On the fifth floor, though, I see David Marcus’ vision of the future, what working at PayPal could be like. It’s an open environment with modern white and chrome desks, no walls between them. Along the walls are open collaboration seating areas meant to deemphasize conference rooms. There are still a few conference rooms that you can reserve for third party payment gateway, though very few. In their place are several small “focus” rooms that don’t operate on a schedule.The message? If you can actually see your coworkers, you don’t need more meetings, because you are always working together. Marcus mutters something about PayPal’s “meeting disease,” as we walk past.
The entire company is going to look like this soon. Nearly 3,000 cubes are getting thrown out. Marcus is going to force people to work together via every means necessary, even furniture. Force the company to operate in small teams. Force them to collaborate on everything. Force them to be — groan with me, if you’ve heard every other guy at a has-been large tech company say it — more startup-like.As he’s stripped away worker comforts, many have balked at these changes and others he’s instituted over the the year and five months he’s been in charge. Those people, Marcus says, need to go.
“There are plenty of companies in Silicon Valley that have cubicles,” he says. “They are welcome to go find them. It’s harsh but you have to let people know it’s happened. This is how it is.” He stops just short of saying, If they don’t like it, they can leave. But it’s clearly the message. “You can’t change the culture nice and slow and gently,” he says. “You need a series of electric shocks. The more violent the better.”
Marcus has inherited a turnaround story unlike almost any other playing out in the tech rustbelt today. PayPal is still the market leader in its category. Not just by market cap and number of employees but by transactions, too. PayPal isn’t a fading legacy brand like Yahoo– it’s still growing. PayPal is heralded as one of the best acquisitions in Silicon Valley history. It’s one of the key things that has been pushing eBay forward: Payments have increased from 24 percent of eBay’s revenue in 2006 to 43 percent last year. Its CEOs have repeatedly said that one day PayPal will be bigger than eBay.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with network effects, or when the benefit of others being on a site makes the experience that much better for everyone – and more valuable to the company. Network effects give you an unfair advantage over newcomers; even a challenger that’s technically better will struggle to pose a threat. (Witness PayPal’s parent company eBay.) Forget building a $1 billion company. Network effects are how you get a $10 billion company.
But PayPal is the cautionary tale of what happens when a network effect works too well. It turns out that solving the many security, fraud, trust, marketing, and chicken-and-egg challenges of building a new system for buying and selling goods around the world creates a moat so wide and deep it can actually be a problem.
Simply put: PayPal got soft. It stopped innovating, because it didn’t have to. PayPal was one of the most ambitious startups of the late 1990s, co-founded by the holy trinity of intense over-performers Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. As that talent migrated, offshore merchant account, the new team realized no one was chasing PayPal any longer. Its sprint slowed to an amble. It still grew. PayPal took a break, got a snack, and took a nap. It still grew. Pretty soon PayPal’s technical muscles started to atrophy. Pre-Marcus, PayPal was still dominant and growing but was also fat, slow, and out-of-touch.
“I’ve never seen as many things broken, and a company still being successful. It was just kinda bizarre,” says Bill Scott previous director of ecommerce UI at Netflix and one of the key new hires Marcus has brought in to transform PayPal’s user experience and make it a more lean, iterative organization.
Under PayPal’s previous regime several sources have told me that the company actively tried not to hire the best engineering talent, because great developers are a headstrong, disruptive force. They just wanted competent coders who could get the job done.
On the fourth floor, you could hold a middle school prom. It’s just a huge, flat empty space. Those same cubicles are there, only they’ve been dismantled and leaning against walls. It’s so flooded with the July San Jose sun, it’s almost blinding. “The carpets are next,” Marcus says, of the ugly beige floors with darker beige squiggles on them.
On the fifth floor, though, I see David Marcus’ vision of the future, what working at PayPal could be like. It’s an open environment with modern white and chrome desks, no walls between them. Along the walls are open collaboration seating areas meant to deemphasize conference rooms. There are still a few conference rooms that you can reserve for third party payment gateway, though very few. In their place are several small “focus” rooms that don’t operate on a schedule.The message? If you can actually see your coworkers, you don’t need more meetings, because you are always working together. Marcus mutters something about PayPal’s “meeting disease,” as we walk past.
The entire company is going to look like this soon. Nearly 3,000 cubes are getting thrown out. Marcus is going to force people to work together via every means necessary, even furniture. Force the company to operate in small teams. Force them to collaborate on everything. Force them to be — groan with me, if you’ve heard every other guy at a has-been large tech company say it — more startup-like.As he’s stripped away worker comforts, many have balked at these changes and others he’s instituted over the the year and five months he’s been in charge. Those people, Marcus says, need to go.
“There are plenty of companies in Silicon Valley that have cubicles,” he says. “They are welcome to go find them. It’s harsh but you have to let people know it’s happened. This is how it is.” He stops just short of saying, If they don’t like it, they can leave. But it’s clearly the message. “You can’t change the culture nice and slow and gently,” he says. “You need a series of electric shocks. The more violent the better.”
Marcus has inherited a turnaround story unlike almost any other playing out in the tech rustbelt today. PayPal is still the market leader in its category. Not just by market cap and number of employees but by transactions, too. PayPal isn’t a fading legacy brand like Yahoo– it’s still growing. PayPal is heralded as one of the best acquisitions in Silicon Valley history. It’s one of the key things that has been pushing eBay forward: Payments have increased from 24 percent of eBay’s revenue in 2006 to 43 percent last year. Its CEOs have repeatedly said that one day PayPal will be bigger than eBay.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with network effects, or when the benefit of others being on a site makes the experience that much better for everyone – and more valuable to the company. Network effects give you an unfair advantage over newcomers; even a challenger that’s technically better will struggle to pose a threat. (Witness PayPal’s parent company eBay.) Forget building a $1 billion company. Network effects are how you get a $10 billion company.
But PayPal is the cautionary tale of what happens when a network effect works too well. It turns out that solving the many security, fraud, trust, marketing, and chicken-and-egg challenges of building a new system for buying and selling goods around the world creates a moat so wide and deep it can actually be a problem.
Simply put: PayPal got soft. It stopped innovating, because it didn’t have to. PayPal was one of the most ambitious startups of the late 1990s, co-founded by the holy trinity of intense over-performers Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. As that talent migrated, offshore merchant account, the new team realized no one was chasing PayPal any longer. Its sprint slowed to an amble. It still grew. PayPal took a break, got a snack, and took a nap. It still grew. Pretty soon PayPal’s technical muscles started to atrophy. Pre-Marcus, PayPal was still dominant and growing but was also fat, slow, and out-of-touch.
“I’ve never seen as many things broken, and a company still being successful. It was just kinda bizarre,” says Bill Scott previous director of ecommerce UI at Netflix and one of the key new hires Marcus has brought in to transform PayPal’s user experience and make it a more lean, iterative organization.
Under PayPal’s previous regime several sources have told me that the company actively tried not to hire the best engineering talent, because great developers are a headstrong, disruptive force. They just wanted competent coders who could get the job done.
Ship Values Rebounding Most
The value of five-year-old Capesizes, the largest iron-ore carriers, rose 5.7 percent to $31.4 million this year, while Panamaxes, the biggest to navigate the Panama Canal, climbed 16 percent to $21.2 million, according to the Baltic Exchange. Investors should buy Golden Ocean and Norden because the shares don’t fully reflect the gains, said Erik Nikolai Stavseth, an analyst at Arctic Securities ASA in Oslo whose recommendations on shipping companies returned 75 percent in three years.
Rising secondhand values are a sign that some investors are getting more bullish on the outlook for third party merchant account, which tumbled as much as 95 percent from their peak in 2008. The Baltic Dry Index, a measure of earnings across four vessel classes, rebounded 42 percent this year as fleet growth slowed and seaborne trade in everything from iron ore and coal to soybeans and fertilizers expanded to a record.
“People are buying ships because they think we’re past the bottom,” said Stavseth, who predicts that shares of Golden Ocean will advance 7.1 percent in a year and Norden will gain 25 percent. “Rising ship prices tell us that the market is moving in the right direction and earnings are expected to increase.”
The Baltic Dry Index reached an 18-month high on July 1 as rates rose for every vessel class in the gauge, according to the London-based Baltic Exchange, which publishes shipping costs along more than 50 maritime routes. Capesize earnings more than doubled this year and those for Panamaxes jumped 35 percent. Both are still below the amount that owners need to break even once financing costs are taken into account.
Capesize earnings will average $16,000 a day next year, the average of nine analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg shows. That’s more than the $14,458 anticipated in freight swaps that third party payment gateway use to bet on future transport prices, Baltic Exchange data show. Owners need $14,500 to break even, according to RS Platou Markets AS, an investment bank in Oslo.
The combined capacity of the dry-bulk fleet will expand 7 percent this year, the least since 2008, according to London-based Clarkson Plc, the largest shipbroker. Rates plunged after owners ordered too many new vessels just before the global recession. The fleet grew 63 percent since 2008 as seaborne trade in commodities advanced 24 percent.
While rates are surging this year, they are still far below the peaks reached before the five-year slump. Capesizes earned as much as $234,000 a day in 2008, compared with $10,550 now. Panamax rates that last priced at $7,481 rose as high as $94,977 in 2007, Baltic Exchange data show. Panamaxes, each capable of hauling about 75,000 metric tons of cargo, need about $11,000 to break even, Platou says.
Vessel values are also still below their record highs. A five-year-old Capesize sold for as much as $153.8 million in 2008 and Panamaxes were trading as high as $90.72 million in 2007. The combined market capitalization of the world’s 75 largest publicly traded shipping companies came to $118.5 billion at the end of July, from as high as $260 billion in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The only long-term solution for FIs to maintain brand equity is to launch their own mobile wallet or become a major component of an industry-leading platform, the Mercator report said.
"Banks should only get involved with truly open mobile wallets that are able to store any type of payment card held by a consumer, along with loyalty and membership cards and identity credentials," Hewitt said.
In the short term, banks can build high-value mobile banking platforms to stand in for fully-fledged mobile payments wallets, the report added, and these platforms will provide a ready customer base when banks launch their own mobile wallets.
Digital bank accounts, which are offered by branch-based banks, online-only banks such as Simple and U.S. prepaid card issuer PreCash's FlipMoney, are used for bill payments and for P2P payments via smartphone. These accounts presently do not offer a mobile shopping payment capability, Hewitt said.
Mobile payment products access a primary or private-label payment account offered by a single merchant or merchant aggregator. Examples include PayPal and Starbucks' mobile app, which links its prepaid card to a smartphone.
True mobile wallets are interactive, virtual forms of physical wallets that let consumers select a specific payment type, such as a credit or debit card, to use at the point of sale. Examples include Paydiant, which just won a contract to supply mobile wallet solutions to Pulse network participants, Visa's V.Me and MasterCard's MasterPass.
Rising secondhand values are a sign that some investors are getting more bullish on the outlook for third party merchant account, which tumbled as much as 95 percent from their peak in 2008. The Baltic Dry Index, a measure of earnings across four vessel classes, rebounded 42 percent this year as fleet growth slowed and seaborne trade in everything from iron ore and coal to soybeans and fertilizers expanded to a record.
“People are buying ships because they think we’re past the bottom,” said Stavseth, who predicts that shares of Golden Ocean will advance 7.1 percent in a year and Norden will gain 25 percent. “Rising ship prices tell us that the market is moving in the right direction and earnings are expected to increase.”
The Baltic Dry Index reached an 18-month high on July 1 as rates rose for every vessel class in the gauge, according to the London-based Baltic Exchange, which publishes shipping costs along more than 50 maritime routes. Capesize earnings more than doubled this year and those for Panamaxes jumped 35 percent. Both are still below the amount that owners need to break even once financing costs are taken into account.
Capesize earnings will average $16,000 a day next year, the average of nine analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg shows. That’s more than the $14,458 anticipated in freight swaps that third party payment gateway use to bet on future transport prices, Baltic Exchange data show. Owners need $14,500 to break even, according to RS Platou Markets AS, an investment bank in Oslo.
The combined capacity of the dry-bulk fleet will expand 7 percent this year, the least since 2008, according to London-based Clarkson Plc, the largest shipbroker. Rates plunged after owners ordered too many new vessels just before the global recession. The fleet grew 63 percent since 2008 as seaborne trade in commodities advanced 24 percent.
While rates are surging this year, they are still far below the peaks reached before the five-year slump. Capesizes earned as much as $234,000 a day in 2008, compared with $10,550 now. Panamax rates that last priced at $7,481 rose as high as $94,977 in 2007, Baltic Exchange data show. Panamaxes, each capable of hauling about 75,000 metric tons of cargo, need about $11,000 to break even, Platou says.
Vessel values are also still below their record highs. A five-year-old Capesize sold for as much as $153.8 million in 2008 and Panamaxes were trading as high as $90.72 million in 2007. The combined market capitalization of the world’s 75 largest publicly traded shipping companies came to $118.5 billion at the end of July, from as high as $260 billion in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The only long-term solution for FIs to maintain brand equity is to launch their own mobile wallet or become a major component of an industry-leading platform, the Mercator report said.
"Banks should only get involved with truly open mobile wallets that are able to store any type of payment card held by a consumer, along with loyalty and membership cards and identity credentials," Hewitt said.
In the short term, banks can build high-value mobile banking platforms to stand in for fully-fledged mobile payments wallets, the report added, and these platforms will provide a ready customer base when banks launch their own mobile wallets.
Digital bank accounts, which are offered by branch-based banks, online-only banks such as Simple and U.S. prepaid card issuer PreCash's FlipMoney, are used for bill payments and for P2P payments via smartphone. These accounts presently do not offer a mobile shopping payment capability, Hewitt said.
Mobile payment products access a primary or private-label payment account offered by a single merchant or merchant aggregator. Examples include PayPal and Starbucks' mobile app, which links its prepaid card to a smartphone.
True mobile wallets are interactive, virtual forms of physical wallets that let consumers select a specific payment type, such as a credit or debit card, to use at the point of sale. Examples include Paydiant, which just won a contract to supply mobile wallet solutions to Pulse network participants, Visa's V.Me and MasterCard's MasterPass.
2013年8月7日星期三
Plausibility aside, bedtime story
The second film in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series - there are 10 novels in total to work with, so prepare for more - is an odd, yet not un-entertaining thing.
The plot feels akin to that which an exhausted father might try to conjure on the fly as his child begs for an original bedtime story late at night, and it's probably because co-writer Rick Riordan, author of the books, was doing precisely this before he decided to release his semi-delirious ramblings to a larger audience.
Now, these ramblings are on the big screen, in 3D, whether they make sense or not. The premise of the series is that the Greek gods were a rather unfaithful lot - many of them shacked up with third party payment gateway, resulting in a bunch of demigods, or half-bloods as they're unceremoniously dubbed here, who all have very mortal-sounding names like Percy,Tyson and Grover and spend the majority of their time at a retreat in the woods outside New York called Camp Half-Blood, run by Stanley Tucci and a centaur.
In this instalment, Percy (Logan Lerman) starts off miserable. After preventing a war between the gods, he's plagued by the fear that he's just a "one-quest wonder." Then, he discovers he has a cyclops half-brother who suffers from incredibly poor depth perception and white-guy dreadlocks. On top of this, he's unable to connect with his father, Poseidon (part of the communication barrier may have something to do with the fact that he keeps speaking to a lake, when Poseidon is god of the sea. Just a hunch).
Fortunately, the camp happens to keep a prophet on staff, so Percy wanders up to ask her what gives. She explains he is destined either to save the world or ruin it - it's unclear which. She also uses the word "raze" at one point, and Percy has to clarify that she doesn't mean "raise" (smart).
Ultimately, he decides it's his destiny, or something like it, to travel to the Bermuda Triangle - apparently called the Sea of Monsters in the Greek god community - capture the Golden Fleece, bring it back in order to heal a dying tree that happens to be the reincarnation of Zeus's half-blood daughter Talia, all while preventing a tortured camper named Luke from resurrecting the evil god Kronos.
It's a lot to take in, but the details hardly matter. Director Thor Freudenthal is clearly on a mission to have fun rather than pay attention to mythological consistency or any remote sense of plausibility, and that's fine. It's how we end up in a Manhattan cab driven by three female zombies who accept payment only in drachmas, or at an abandoned amusement park on an island where Polyphemus appears to be using the Golden Fleece as a burping cloth (it does look absorbent).
Riordan's humour also comes through in a series of mortal-meets-immortal culture clashes - the gateway to the underworld, for instance, is reportedly located in Hollywood. And, if you want to deliver something to a god, you simply visit Hermes, who runs a high-tech enterprise out of a UPS branch.
Any moral heft in this film is carried by Lerman, best known for his role in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and this is a good thing - he can step up to lead but also knows when to let others take the spotlight, and he's got a way of delivering bizarre humour in a way that only makes it funnier. One of the best lines in Sea Monsters comes near the end, when Percy says, "Finding out you have a destiny is a lot like finding out you have a cyclops for a half-brother - it's not as bad as you think."
Not your run-of-the-mill lesson to walk away with, that's for sure. Of course, nothing here is run-of-the-mill, which is what makes it so appealing. This isn't to say there won't be endless moments of frustration with absurd plot twists, onedimensional characters and way too much power given to a fleece blanket, but somehow all these wrongs add up to an inexplicable right. It's why children love improvised bedtime stories - a meandering, faulty narrative can be a ton of fun.
Deputy Green said: “Changes to the economic climate have continued to affect the housing market. The demand for affordable homes is increasing each month, which means people are waiting longer for high risk merchant account. I’m confident that the significant policy changes proposed by the Minister for Planning and Environment will, alongside other initiatives such as our Deferred Payment and Deposit Loan Schemes, help to deliver affordable homes targeted to those who need them most.”
The Affordable Housing Gateway has just published its monthly waiting list report for July and it shows that there are currently a total of 1,340 people in need of various types of social housing. However, this figure does not take into account the unmet demand for other groups such as key workers. It is also important to recognise the growing need for over-55s and life-long homes to meet the needs of an ageing population and that certain groups, such as single people and childless couples under 50 do not presently qualify for social rented housing. More sites may therefore be required over time to meet the needs of these groups.
Deputy Green said: “The Gateway is now giving us very reliable data on the housing requirements of our community but I am concerned that certain groups are still excluded. We will need to deal with that in time through the development of a long-term housing strategy, work which the new Strategic Housing Unit has underway. One of the key areas that will need to be considered is how we take care of the housing needs of essential key workers, particularly those that support our Health Service.”
Read the full products at http://austpay.com/.
The plot feels akin to that which an exhausted father might try to conjure on the fly as his child begs for an original bedtime story late at night, and it's probably because co-writer Rick Riordan, author of the books, was doing precisely this before he decided to release his semi-delirious ramblings to a larger audience.
Now, these ramblings are on the big screen, in 3D, whether they make sense or not. The premise of the series is that the Greek gods were a rather unfaithful lot - many of them shacked up with third party payment gateway, resulting in a bunch of demigods, or half-bloods as they're unceremoniously dubbed here, who all have very mortal-sounding names like Percy,Tyson and Grover and spend the majority of their time at a retreat in the woods outside New York called Camp Half-Blood, run by Stanley Tucci and a centaur.
In this instalment, Percy (Logan Lerman) starts off miserable. After preventing a war between the gods, he's plagued by the fear that he's just a "one-quest wonder." Then, he discovers he has a cyclops half-brother who suffers from incredibly poor depth perception and white-guy dreadlocks. On top of this, he's unable to connect with his father, Poseidon (part of the communication barrier may have something to do with the fact that he keeps speaking to a lake, when Poseidon is god of the sea. Just a hunch).
Fortunately, the camp happens to keep a prophet on staff, so Percy wanders up to ask her what gives. She explains he is destined either to save the world or ruin it - it's unclear which. She also uses the word "raze" at one point, and Percy has to clarify that she doesn't mean "raise" (smart).
Ultimately, he decides it's his destiny, or something like it, to travel to the Bermuda Triangle - apparently called the Sea of Monsters in the Greek god community - capture the Golden Fleece, bring it back in order to heal a dying tree that happens to be the reincarnation of Zeus's half-blood daughter Talia, all while preventing a tortured camper named Luke from resurrecting the evil god Kronos.
It's a lot to take in, but the details hardly matter. Director Thor Freudenthal is clearly on a mission to have fun rather than pay attention to mythological consistency or any remote sense of plausibility, and that's fine. It's how we end up in a Manhattan cab driven by three female zombies who accept payment only in drachmas, or at an abandoned amusement park on an island where Polyphemus appears to be using the Golden Fleece as a burping cloth (it does look absorbent).
Riordan's humour also comes through in a series of mortal-meets-immortal culture clashes - the gateway to the underworld, for instance, is reportedly located in Hollywood. And, if you want to deliver something to a god, you simply visit Hermes, who runs a high-tech enterprise out of a UPS branch.
Any moral heft in this film is carried by Lerman, best known for his role in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and this is a good thing - he can step up to lead but also knows when to let others take the spotlight, and he's got a way of delivering bizarre humour in a way that only makes it funnier. One of the best lines in Sea Monsters comes near the end, when Percy says, "Finding out you have a destiny is a lot like finding out you have a cyclops for a half-brother - it's not as bad as you think."
Not your run-of-the-mill lesson to walk away with, that's for sure. Of course, nothing here is run-of-the-mill, which is what makes it so appealing. This isn't to say there won't be endless moments of frustration with absurd plot twists, onedimensional characters and way too much power given to a fleece blanket, but somehow all these wrongs add up to an inexplicable right. It's why children love improvised bedtime stories - a meandering, faulty narrative can be a ton of fun.
Deputy Green said: “Changes to the economic climate have continued to affect the housing market. The demand for affordable homes is increasing each month, which means people are waiting longer for high risk merchant account. I’m confident that the significant policy changes proposed by the Minister for Planning and Environment will, alongside other initiatives such as our Deferred Payment and Deposit Loan Schemes, help to deliver affordable homes targeted to those who need them most.”
The Affordable Housing Gateway has just published its monthly waiting list report for July and it shows that there are currently a total of 1,340 people in need of various types of social housing. However, this figure does not take into account the unmet demand for other groups such as key workers. It is also important to recognise the growing need for over-55s and life-long homes to meet the needs of an ageing population and that certain groups, such as single people and childless couples under 50 do not presently qualify for social rented housing. More sites may therefore be required over time to meet the needs of these groups.
Deputy Green said: “The Gateway is now giving us very reliable data on the housing requirements of our community but I am concerned that certain groups are still excluded. We will need to deal with that in time through the development of a long-term housing strategy, work which the new Strategic Housing Unit has underway. One of the key areas that will need to be considered is how we take care of the housing needs of essential key workers, particularly those that support our Health Service.”
Read the full products at http://austpay.com/.
Dex Media Management Discusses
Good morning, and welcome to Dex Media's Second Quarter 2013 Conference Call. With me today are Peter McDonald, Chief Executive Officer; and Dee Jones, Chief Financial Officer. The statements made by the company today during this call, are forward-looking statements. These statements include the company's beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting the company's business and are subject to risks and uncertainties.
The company advises you not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements and to consider them in light of the risk factors set forth in reports filed by Dex Media and its predecessor companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This was an eventful quarter with the completion of the merger between Dex One and SuperMedia on April 30. The combination of these companies is good for shareholders, third party merchant account, our clients and the future of our employees. I again recognize and thank the Boards of Dex One and SuperMedia, as well as our advisors, lenders and shareholders for your support.
We are now 3 months into integration, and we have accomplished a lot. While the merger was consummated 4 months later than originally planned, all of the planning that had been done prior to the closing date is paying off, and we are seeing the benefits in best practices, strengthened management teams and synergies.
I'm very pleased with how the teams are working together, and I can say we are on track in that regard at this point. We have evaluated nearly all the jobs in the company. We have made some tough decisions and have identified and put in place our top 127 managers in just the first 2 months of integration. It is interesting and significant that our management team consists of nearly an even split of people from both predecessor companies.
I'm very pleased with the talent in the new company. It is important to get leadership team in place so that we can make the decisions necessary to drive the business forward. This has been a distracting time as people needed to get the "me questions" resolved. With nearly 5,000 people now in place in 135 locations, we are anxious to continue to make progress.
The HR and legal teams have done an outstanding job of getting this work completed. In each of the functional departments, we have quality leadership in place and are moving forward each day to improve this business. Marketing team is working on migrating the best products across the entire footprint and leveraging best practices. The bundles Dex One used will be rolled out to the former SuperMedia footprint, and the former SuperMedia digital bundles will be rolled into the former Dex One markets.
Over the second half of 2013 and into 2014, we look forward to rolling out additional products across our entire combined footprint. Getting all the systems ready to accommodate these new products is high on our list of priorities as we migrate our customer base to the digital world. As we get deeper into this combination, it is clear that a lot of quality work was done in each organization prior to the merger.
Today’s consumers are increasingly relying on credit cards and innovative payment methods to make purchases. As leaders in the global payment sector, Visa (NYSE: V) and MasterCard (NYSE: MA) are both poised to continue benefiting from this trend.
In 1958, the first-ever large-scale credit card program was launched by Bank of America in Fresno, Calif. The company sent out plastic “BankAmericards” with $300 credit limits to 60,000 of its customers. Bank of America soon began to license its third party payment gateway system to banks in other U.S. states. In 1970, the various issuers of the cards created an alliance to operate the program, and later renamed the company Visa.
In 2008, Visa went public in what was the highest-valued IPO in history at the time. Visa now operates in more than 200 countries and in virtually every currency. It is the largest retail electronic payments network company in the world, with over $6.5 trillion in total transactions completed last year.
In 1966, in an effort to compete with Visa, a rival credit card was created by a cooperative of California banks under the name “Master Charge: The Interbank Card.” The card had a unique Venn diagram logo, and in 1979, its name was changed to MasterCard.
In 2012, MasterCard processed 34 billion transactions with a value of $3.6 trillion. The company operates in over 210 countries and in 150 different currencies. While Visa has nearly twice as many cards in circulation, MasterCard has been growing its revenue at a faster rate of late.
Both Visa and MasterCard generate revenue primarily by collecting fees from merchants and banks based on the number and dollar value of the transactions that they process. Unlike competitors such as American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) and Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), they do not actually extend credit to their customers. The banks that issue the credit cards take on the credit risk, while Visa and MasterCard act only as middlemen, charging fees for facilitating consumer transactions.
In addition to credit cards, the companies also offer debit cards. While credit cards offer users the ability to borrow money and pay for purchases at a later date, debit card payments are immediately transferred from the cardholder’s bank account to the merchant.
In recent years, both Visa and MasterCard have also been expanding into emerging markets where most transactions have traditionally been completed in cash. As these countries continue to develop, consumer spending should increase, as will the demand for credit.
An increasingly competitive area for both companies is the Internet payment segment, where eBay’s (NASDAQ: EBAY) PayPal unit has been a leading innovator. PayPal’s customers make online payments using any card or bank account of their choice. Both Visa and MasterCard generate additional transaction volumes through PayPal, but the latter is now becoming more of a direct competitor. Last August, PayPal reached an agreement with Discover to give shoppers access to their online accounts in physical retail stores.
Based on Friday’s closing price of $184.00, Visa has a market value of $119 billion. The stock trades at a multiple of 21 times 2014 earnings estimates, while the company is expected to grow profits by 19 per cent over the next five years. MasterCard last traded at $645.57, implying a market value of $78 billion. While the stock also trades at a forward earnings multiple of 21 times, the company is expected to grow at a slightly slower rate. MasterCard’s shares are up 31 per cent this year, while Visa’s stock has gained 21 per cent.
The company advises you not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements and to consider them in light of the risk factors set forth in reports filed by Dex Media and its predecessor companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This was an eventful quarter with the completion of the merger between Dex One and SuperMedia on April 30. The combination of these companies is good for shareholders, third party merchant account, our clients and the future of our employees. I again recognize and thank the Boards of Dex One and SuperMedia, as well as our advisors, lenders and shareholders for your support.
We are now 3 months into integration, and we have accomplished a lot. While the merger was consummated 4 months later than originally planned, all of the planning that had been done prior to the closing date is paying off, and we are seeing the benefits in best practices, strengthened management teams and synergies.
I'm very pleased with how the teams are working together, and I can say we are on track in that regard at this point. We have evaluated nearly all the jobs in the company. We have made some tough decisions and have identified and put in place our top 127 managers in just the first 2 months of integration. It is interesting and significant that our management team consists of nearly an even split of people from both predecessor companies.
I'm very pleased with the talent in the new company. It is important to get leadership team in place so that we can make the decisions necessary to drive the business forward. This has been a distracting time as people needed to get the "me questions" resolved. With nearly 5,000 people now in place in 135 locations, we are anxious to continue to make progress.
The HR and legal teams have done an outstanding job of getting this work completed. In each of the functional departments, we have quality leadership in place and are moving forward each day to improve this business. Marketing team is working on migrating the best products across the entire footprint and leveraging best practices. The bundles Dex One used will be rolled out to the former SuperMedia footprint, and the former SuperMedia digital bundles will be rolled into the former Dex One markets.
Over the second half of 2013 and into 2014, we look forward to rolling out additional products across our entire combined footprint. Getting all the systems ready to accommodate these new products is high on our list of priorities as we migrate our customer base to the digital world. As we get deeper into this combination, it is clear that a lot of quality work was done in each organization prior to the merger.
Today’s consumers are increasingly relying on credit cards and innovative payment methods to make purchases. As leaders in the global payment sector, Visa (NYSE: V) and MasterCard (NYSE: MA) are both poised to continue benefiting from this trend.
In 1958, the first-ever large-scale credit card program was launched by Bank of America in Fresno, Calif. The company sent out plastic “BankAmericards” with $300 credit limits to 60,000 of its customers. Bank of America soon began to license its third party payment gateway system to banks in other U.S. states. In 1970, the various issuers of the cards created an alliance to operate the program, and later renamed the company Visa.
In 2008, Visa went public in what was the highest-valued IPO in history at the time. Visa now operates in more than 200 countries and in virtually every currency. It is the largest retail electronic payments network company in the world, with over $6.5 trillion in total transactions completed last year.
In 1966, in an effort to compete with Visa, a rival credit card was created by a cooperative of California banks under the name “Master Charge: The Interbank Card.” The card had a unique Venn diagram logo, and in 1979, its name was changed to MasterCard.
In 2012, MasterCard processed 34 billion transactions with a value of $3.6 trillion. The company operates in over 210 countries and in 150 different currencies. While Visa has nearly twice as many cards in circulation, MasterCard has been growing its revenue at a faster rate of late.
Both Visa and MasterCard generate revenue primarily by collecting fees from merchants and banks based on the number and dollar value of the transactions that they process. Unlike competitors such as American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) and Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), they do not actually extend credit to their customers. The banks that issue the credit cards take on the credit risk, while Visa and MasterCard act only as middlemen, charging fees for facilitating consumer transactions.
In addition to credit cards, the companies also offer debit cards. While credit cards offer users the ability to borrow money and pay for purchases at a later date, debit card payments are immediately transferred from the cardholder’s bank account to the merchant.
In recent years, both Visa and MasterCard have also been expanding into emerging markets where most transactions have traditionally been completed in cash. As these countries continue to develop, consumer spending should increase, as will the demand for credit.
An increasingly competitive area for both companies is the Internet payment segment, where eBay’s (NASDAQ: EBAY) PayPal unit has been a leading innovator. PayPal’s customers make online payments using any card or bank account of their choice. Both Visa and MasterCard generate additional transaction volumes through PayPal, but the latter is now becoming more of a direct competitor. Last August, PayPal reached an agreement with Discover to give shoppers access to their online accounts in physical retail stores.
Based on Friday’s closing price of $184.00, Visa has a market value of $119 billion. The stock trades at a multiple of 21 times 2014 earnings estimates, while the company is expected to grow profits by 19 per cent over the next five years. MasterCard last traded at $645.57, implying a market value of $78 billion. While the stock also trades at a forward earnings multiple of 21 times, the company is expected to grow at a slightly slower rate. MasterCard’s shares are up 31 per cent this year, while Visa’s stock has gained 21 per cent.
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