Britons Like Plastic
A new report from Datamonitor indicates that U.K. residents are gaining an affinity for using plastic to pay for their purchases. "UK Plastic Cards 2001" reports that borrowing on credit cards has increased by an average of 22
percent a year between 1996 and 2000. Total balances outstanding on these cards has also increased, going from £18.7 billion in 1996 to £41.1 billion in 2001.
Add other plastic payment methods with credit cards and the numbers grow even more astonishing. By 2001, there were about 121 million credit, charge and debit cards issued in the U.K., with outstanding balances totaling more than £41 billion. The total amount spent on credit cards alone was £280 billion. Datamonitor expects that the number of credit and charge cards issued by 2005 will be 92.7 million, nearly twice the number in use now.
Several problems follow in the wake of the increased usage of plastic. The growth in fraudulent transactions, for one, has been growing faster than the growth in the value of transactions. Their growth rates are estimated to be 22.8 percent annually and 14.3 percent annually respectively. Losses in 1999 amounted to £189.4 million, which probably rose to £300 million for 2000. While fraud only accounted for 0.3 percent of transactions in 1999, it was a 50 percent increase in the proportion of fraudulent transactions (only 0.2 percent) throughout 1995 to 1998.
Another problem is that credit cards have become easy to obtain and easy to use, increasing consumers' debt load. Both the National Association of Citizen's Advice Bureaux and the Office of Fair Trading have expressed
concern that consumers are being misled as to the price of borrowing on credit cards. The two groups also believe British consumers are borrowing more than they can afford.
"Our findings indicate the advent of a plastic dominated society; not only do British consumers hold greater numbers of plastic cards than ever before, but debit cards are increasingly dominating people's payment habits,
" a Datamonitor analyst said. "Although debit cards are generally used for lower value purchases, high frequency of use combined with the ability to obtain cashback has escalated the proportion of transactions on debit cards. It is likely that debit cards will continue to dominate transaction to 2005. The dominance of the debit card, together with easier access to credit, means that the British wallet of the future is likely to be increasingly dominated by plastic as new generations of consumers grow up being used to making payments by card."
Java Careers Still Hot
Seventy-five percent of new e-business development initiatives by 2003 will include Java or Microsoft technologies. Further, as indicated by survey conducted by Gartner Research of more than 400 IT professionals, 80 percent said their organizations use Java technology today. The sum result has researchers at Gartner concluding that IT professionals and college students alike need to learn Java. Unlike the hue and cry back in 1995 to learn HTML, Gartner researchers say, the demand for Java is derived from massive business-to-business applications that will thrive long into the next decade.
"Specialized careers like those of IT professionals usually fare well, even during tough economic times," said Robin Flatau-Reynoso, a Gartner analyst. "Java is a great skill to have in the IT professional portfolio over the next five to 10 years."
E-Mail Rules: Who Knew About 'Em?
Nearly half of the respondents to a survey about e-mail usage policies established by U.K. corporations say that they either have no such policy or don't enforce the policy that was put into place. The study, "Email: Coming out of the Amateur's Closet!" was conducted for ASP firm Interliant by Vanson Bourne, which surveyed 100 business people across the U.K. The findings also show that 28 percent of e-mailers are less attentive when sending correspondence via e-mail compared to that sent via snail mail, even though the survey made no distinction between correspondence intended for internal, personal or customer/client communication. Most respondents said, however, that at least half of their e-mail was business-related, while the most common range of total messages sent and received daily was 30-50.
Making Mobile Successful
Mobile networks need a way to hook customers, but the path to successfully attracting users isn't through portals, according to Forrester Research. Instead, the key to attracting traffic for mobile companies will be using what
Forrester calls "mobile activity networks," which the firm defines as "mutual links between a group of mobile sites that orbit specific user activities."
"The 40 WAP site owners that we interviewed believe that they know how to drive WAP traffic--by placing links at mobile portals," said one analyst at Forrester's European headquarters in Amsterdam. "However, the 20 mobile portals we interviewed don't aim to drive traffic to other sites. On the PC-based Web, portals drive traffic because users need them, but in contrast, portals won't play the same role in the mobile Internet because
user circumstances differ sharply. Mobile Internet users have no time, interest, or need to spend time surfing from WAP portals."
Instead of placing links and buying ads on mobile portals, these companies will most effectively drive traffic by teaming up with one another to form "mobile activity networks."