Tag Archives: Credit Angel

Finance

There Are New Forms Of Money On The Horizon

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Take a look at these transactional trends to see how you might be spending your money in the future.

What does the future hold for the way we pay?

Paying for your purchases used to be to the most straightforward task around, you’d exchange your coins with the cashier and in return you’d receive your goods. Simple. But today, a modest transaction can involve some serious tech.

Whilst everything in the world seems to be making a switch to digital, money is no exception. Gone are the days of signing signatures, punching in pins and certainly, counting coins, but the advancements show no sign of stopping. As contactless method currently seems to offer the most convenient method of payment – it begs the question of what could possibly come next.

The use of physical cash is dwindling as more and more options become available to consumers.

Consider how the Corona virus lock downs have also affected the use of physical cash:  businesses and retail either favor interac and credit cards or outright refuse the use of cash transactions. Look to the infographic below for three of the most prominent examples of the way our spending habits are currently evolving.  For the Silo, Danielle Mowbray /creditangel.co.uk

Future of spending with digital money

Culture

Google Fined Billions By EU For Breaking Competition Law

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It’s hard to imagine how much the latest Google fine really equates to. Really difficult in fact. But don’t worry! We’ve worked that out for you. Surprise, surprise, it’s a lot of money.  How many times a day do you say or think “I’ll have to google that!”. Probably a lot. Google has definitely become essential for a lot of us. But it’s become so big a company that it needs to be regulated.

Google’s latest fine, unlike last year’s fine, was handed down by the EU commission in June 2017, is a reported at 2.42 billion Euros. That’s around £2.13 billion GBP or $3.42 billion CDN. Whew! That’s more money that most of us can even fathom. What did they do that was so wrong? Well, they broke competition law, by prioritizing their own shopping services, causing competitors services to drop dramatically. None of which have ever really recovered.

Ariel Ezrachi, director of the University of Oxford Centre for Competition Law and Policy, says “it objects to Google leveraging its power in search to give itself an unfair advantage in price comparison.” That’s one in the eye for Silicon Valley’s “winner takes all” attitude. Google are well equipped to handle a fine though, even one that sounds so hefty. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, made a profit of almost £2 billion in the first six weeks of 2017 alone.

So, it sounds like that fine is just a drop in their considerably large ocean. But it’s still hard to imagine such a huge amount. Which got us thinking. If the average Joe were to be fined in a relative way, what would that look like? Maybe something like this infographic from credit.angel.co.uk.  Much easier to understand (and far less than I imagined to be honest!) For the Silo, Danielle Mowbray.