All Posts Tagged With: "banking"
How to justify purchasing a smartphone
Eight apps that can help students save money
Smartphone photo by leyla.a on Flickr.
From the Maclean’s University Rankings. For more university advice, get your copy today!
Let’s face it: university is expensive. Between tuition, textbooks and having a social life, the cost adds up quickly. Luckily, smartphones can cut costs with a range of apps designed to manage money and track expenses. Forget bank tellers. Since the first mobile banking application became available in Canada in early 2010, the number of Canadians using daily mobile banking has climbed to more than 2.5 million, according to a July report by the Toronto-based Solutions Research Group.
Not surprisingly, the number of apps has also exploded. Here, in no particular order, are the top eight for saving money via your smartphone.
1. Mobile banking apps
Cost: Free
Available for: iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, BlackBerry or any Internet-enabled device
Standing in line at the bank is as exciting as a library tour. Luckily, Canada’s “Big Five”—the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce—all offer a full suite of mobile apps for everyday banking transactions such as checking account balances, paying bills, and transferring money. Plus, you can use your bank’s ATM locator to avoid wallet-gouging fees from machines outside your bank’s network.
Business grads: We’ll pay you to not come to work… yet
A twist on downsizing in investment banking
Recent university grad looking to get into investment banking? One I-bank will pay you to go and take a sabbatical year — before you even start work.
That’s the word from Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank that, like every other player on Wall Street, is feeling the pain of the recession. So it’s temporarily laying off employees who haven’t even done their first day of work yet. According to an article from Bloomberg yesterday (the best link I could find was here; click and scroll down a bit), 20 per cent of CS’s next class of investment bank analysts have accepted a US$40,000 offer to defer their employment start date until July, 2010. The offer was made to U.S. college graduates recruited to the bank, who would have started this summer.
The news is one more example of the poor job environment facing aspiring bankers. But CS’s long term view is surprisingly confident. After all, CS isn’t eliminating these not-yet-employees. It’s asking them to wait a year — by which time it presumably expects that its services and their skills will be more in demand. Instead of burning the proverbial furniture to heat the building, it’s trying to hang on to the most talented young recruits, assuming that it will soon need them. As the cliche goes, only time will tell.
