News & Views Detail

Not so many years ago multi app cards were the 'next big thing'. Then it was contactless, NFC, mobile payments, social networking and so on. The FSA has recently stated that financial firms must ensure they provide appropriate risk warnings when using new media such as social networking sites, blogs and forums to promote products and services. With banks increasingly turning to sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as smartphone applications, to promote their wares, the watchdog has reiterated that its rules focus on content not medium.  Having looked at the comments on some of the bank sites it wouldn't be a bad thing if some of the contributors focused on content too. 

In the card world you can also use Blippy on Twitter to tell all your 'followers' what you are using your credit card to buy.  Personally I would rather stick needles in my eyes but I'm sure someone finds it useful.  But there are some aspects of social networking sites which are worth noting: 

• The average Facebook session lasts 35 minutes.  Rather longer than most people spend on financial sites.  
• The fastest growing group of users on Facebook is women over 50.
• In April it was announced that PayPal is to introduce a service that will enable customers to make payments as small as $.50 using debit and credit cards, aggregating the payments to make them viable.
• PayPal's new iPhone app was downloaded more than a million times in the first 3 weeks.
• Since Apple's app store was launched 2 years ago 185,000 apps have been developed and more than 4 billion downloaded. 

And you wonder what happened to multi app cards?