March 29, 2024

Bucks Blog: ING Direct’s Paperless Account Now Offers Paper Checks

Even as payments become increasingly electronic, the need for paper checks persists. Just ask the folks at the online bank, ING Direct, which touts its Electric Orange checking account as “paperless” — but which just began offering its customers the option to use, well, paper.

Todd Sandler, the bank’s head of product strategy, said the bank wasn’t encouraging the use of paper checks. “Our hope is that paper checks go the way of the abacus,” he said.

But some smaller merchants and local groups — your local parent-teacher association, for instance — still don’t accept debit card payments, so even bank customers who are very technology savvy sometimes need to get out the pen and checkbook.

The paper-check option, Mr. Sandler says, was a missing element holding some customers back from ditching other bank accounts and using ING Direct alone. So last week, it began offering its customers the option of ordering paper checks. (Mr. Sandler said the change isn’t related to the deal for Capital One to acquire ING Direct.)

“Our customers don’t want paper checks,” he said. “But they actually need them.”

A recent Federal Reserve study found that check payments declined 7 percent between 2006 and 2009, while the use of debit cards rose by 15 percent. Checks now comprise less than a quarter of all non-cash payments, the study said—but that still means billions are used each year.

ING Direct already offered a “mail a check” option, for recipients who don’t accept electronic payments. This allows customers to log on to their ING Direct bank account and fill in payment information electronically. The bank then mails a check to the recipient.

Now, ING Direct customers can buy their own checks from the bank, at a cost of $5 per book of 50 checks. The bank has added some security features to make the use of paper checks more secure, he noted. For instance, when customers receive their checkbook, they must go to their online account and activate the checks—much like the process for activating a debit card. That, Mr. Sandler says, assures that no one can fraudulently order checks with your account number.

And yes, now that it offers paper checks, Electric Orange will also charge bounced-check fees. But the fee is just $9 —a fraction of the $35 fee typical at most large banks. The fee is charged if the check exceeds the account’s available balance, including its available overdraft line of credit.

What bills do you still pay using paper checks? And would you stop if the biller would accept some other form of payment?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=bd98a7e57c373039f89ac6687e24c684

Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer Departs

PARIS — The struggling Finnish cellphone maker Nokia said Thursday that its chief technology officer had taken a leave of absence and would be temporarily replaced by head of the company’s research center.

News of the departure of Richard Green, an American who joined Nokia only last year from Sun Microsystems, came as Standard Poor’s cut Nokia’s long-term credit rating for the second time this year.

Nokia said Mr. Green had taken a leave “to attend to a personal matter.” Paivyt Tallqvist, head of media relations at the company in Espoo, Finland, said there was “no specific timeline” for his return.

Until his return, Mr. Green will be replaced by Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research Center, she said, adding the change will have “no impact on our product strategy or our product launches.”

Earlier, however, a Finnish newspaper reported that Mr. Green was unlikely to return because of disagreements over strategy. Without citing its sources, the Helsingin Sanomat reported that Mr. Green was unhappy with management decisions, including abandoning plans to introduce devices based on the MeeGo smartphone operating system that had been under development with the chipmaker Intel.

Nokia remains the No. 1 producer of cellphones globally, but its market share has been sliding. At the premium end, it has been losing ground to Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry smart phones from Research in Motion and devices using Google’s free Android software.

At the cheaper end, phones from companies like ZTE of China and Micromax of India have been winning ground, as have so-called no-brand manufacturers — small Chinese companies — which have been wining sales in India and China Africa, Latin America and Russia.

At the end of last month, Nokia said that mobile phone sales in the second quarter would be “substantially” below a previous forecast of €6.1 billion to €6.6 billion, blaming difficult conditions in China and Europe and lower than expected average selling prices and device volumes.

Stephen Elop, the former Microsoft executive who became Nokia’s chief executive in September, plans to win back lost ground by switching to Microsoft’s Windows Phone software from Nokia’s own Symbian platform. That switch is expected to take place at the end of this year or early next year.

The alliance with Microsoft was announced in February and has been seen by some analysts as a possible precursor to a more formal tie-up between the two.

The company’s shares price Thursday was down slightly at midday in Helsinki. For the year to date, the stock has plunged 44.2 percent.

On Thursday, Standard Poor’s cut Nokia’s rating by one notch to BBB+; three further downgrades would classify the company’s debt as junk. Another agency, Fitch Ratings downgraded the group this week to BBB-, just one a level above non-investment grade status.

As it tries to lift sales, Nokia also has been trying to trim costs. It said in April that it would eliminate 12 percent of its global work force, or 7,000 jobs, to help save €1 billion by the end of 2012. In a leaked memo this year, Mr. Elop had compared the company’s predicament, trying to catch up with Apple and Google, to that of a man standing on a burning oil rig at sea.

All this has made the company more vulnerable to a takeover — potential suitors mentioned recently include Samsung Electronics of Korea, Chinese groups and private equity firms.

“I think Nokia will play defensively until the Windows phone ramps up, and then it will push to find a slot in the business end of the market, stressing compatibility with personal computers,” said Ilkka Rauvola, an analyst at Danske Markets in Helsinki.

The appointment of Mr. Tirri is seen by some analysts as a return to basics, and a focus on chips, motherboards and transmission technology. He has been at the company since 2004 and is also a professor of computer engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology. His resumé highlights a host of publications on subjects including information modeling, neural networks and data mining.

Mr. Green reported directly to the chief executive. Previously he was executive vice president at Sun Microsystem’s software division, where he had broad responsibility for Sun’s software business, including services, sales, product and business strategy, and product development. Mr. Green could not be reached for comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/technology/10nokia.html?partner=rss&emc=rss