Mitek Mobile has developed an app that lets you pay your bills by simply taking a picture of the bill you want to pay and verifying your payment information.
According to the demo video, the app scans the bill for basic information, such as address, company name and payment amount. It then allows you to verify the information before completing the transaction through your bank account.
As Mitek puts it, it sounds like the "easiest way to pay non-recurring bills", but why not simply use your bank account? While paying bills like your electricity or Internet might be simple to automate through your bank's website, it sounds like this app is for the random medical bill that insists on a check or money order.
For my money, I'd like to see individual apps like AT&T's own iPhone app, which integrates bill payment with the ability to customize my account, manage my information and view my usage statistics. For the AT&T app, I was lured in with payment, but it's everything else that's kept me from calling up their customer service lines and using up their resources.
Mitek offers a number of other mobile apps that allow you to deposit checks, fax documents and more, all using your smartphone. Neat.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
robert shumake twitter
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake hall of shame
Mitek Mobile has developed an app that lets you pay your bills by simply taking a picture of the bill you want to pay and verifying your payment information.
According to the demo video, the app scans the bill for basic information, such as address, company name and payment amount. It then allows you to verify the information before completing the transaction through your bank account.
As Mitek puts it, it sounds like the "easiest way to pay non-recurring bills", but why not simply use your bank account? While paying bills like your electricity or Internet might be simple to automate through your bank's website, it sounds like this app is for the random medical bill that insists on a check or money order.
For my money, I'd like to see individual apps like AT&T's own iPhone app, which integrates bill payment with the ability to customize my account, manage my information and view my usage statistics. For the AT&T app, I was lured in with payment, but it's everything else that's kept me from calling up their customer service lines and using up their resources.
Mitek offers a number of other mobile apps that allow you to deposit checks, fax documents and more, all using your smartphone. Neat.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
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The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake hall of shame
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake hall of shame
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake twitter
Mitek Mobile has developed an app that lets you pay your bills by simply taking a picture of the bill you want to pay and verifying your payment information.
According to the demo video, the app scans the bill for basic information, such as address, company name and payment amount. It then allows you to verify the information before completing the transaction through your bank account.
As Mitek puts it, it sounds like the "easiest way to pay non-recurring bills", but why not simply use your bank account? While paying bills like your electricity or Internet might be simple to automate through your bank's website, it sounds like this app is for the random medical bill that insists on a check or money order.
For my money, I'd like to see individual apps like AT&T's own iPhone app, which integrates bill payment with the ability to customize my account, manage my information and view my usage statistics. For the AT&T app, I was lured in with payment, but it's everything else that's kept me from calling up their customer service lines and using up their resources.
Mitek offers a number of other mobile apps that allow you to deposit checks, fax documents and more, all using your smartphone. Neat.
This was probably inevitable: the minute that Dodd-Frank cracked down on the fees charged by credit cards aimed at students, some other bright financial innovation would crop up. This time, a debit card aimed at students. Which carries lots of fees. Ylan Mui reports that a company called Higher One has started signing up colleges around the country, taking on the burden of providing cash to students. In return, it gets lots of fees:
Students say several of the fees associated with Higher One’s card are particularly irksome, including the $19 inactivity fee, a 50-cent charge for using a PIN to make a purchase rather than a signature, and a $2.50 fee for using other banks’ ATMs…
Higher One said that only 1 percent of customers have been charged an inactivity fee and that more than half are charged the 50-cent fee only once. All fees are listed on Higher One’s Web site, along with tips on avoiding them.
“We have a big effort with educating students on how to use the account,” Smith said. “We’re very passionate about financial literacy.”
If the fees are listed on Higher One’s website, they’re not exactly prominent. I did find this page, eventually, via this blog entry, but it just says that “when you swipe & sign, you won’t be charged the PIN-based transaction fee”. I haven’t been able to find a page showing a 50-cent transaction fee anywhere*, although I did manage to find this page, showing a $25 fee for domestic wire transfers and a $50 fee for international wire transfers. “Higher One offers less costly alternatives for transferring funds”, it says, without giving any indication what they might be; I suspect that what they’re talking about is transfers to or from people who have already registered somehow with Higher One.
It should go without saying that any firm which is “very passionate about financial literacy” would encourage, rather than penalize, simple, cheap and safe PIN-debit transactions. It would not give students a debit card and then tell them that if they want to avoid fees they should select the “credit” option rather than the “debit” option when they come to pay.
And I can’t think of any good reason to charge a $19 inactivity fee to people who haven’t used their cards in 9 months.
The fact is that students are often very naive when it comes to money, and it’s easy to gouge them once or twice before they learn that banks are not necessarily on their side. If you can get your card accepted by a majority of freshmen every year, and then come up with all manner of weird fees to hit them with, that’s a great way of making money out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, all students should have a bank account: giving them a debit card instead only serves to maximize the number of unbanked students. So while I’m sure cards like this are attractive to colleges, it would be great if either the colleges or else the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started being a lot more critical of them. Prepaid cards only ever make sense if the alternative is being completely unbanked; that should not ever be the case for students.
*At Southern Oregon University, Higher One agreed to waive the 50-cent PIN-debit charge, but only if there was a simultaneous “swipe-and-sign” campaign. If the campaign is unsuccessful and students do the sensible thing by using PIN debit, then the university can be charged $2 per student for “PIN fee elimination”.
Update: Higher One’s Donald Smith responds:
Higher One was founded 10 years ago by three college students (undergraduates at the time) who were looking for streamlining the way financial aid refunds were distributed to students. Today we work with more than 675 campuses across the country, have a 97% client retention rating, and an A+ rating with the BBB.
The OneAccount is Higher One’s optional, no minimum balance, no monthly fee, FDIC-Insured checking account created by students for students. We do not offer a stored value card. We are very open with our fee schedule. We post it on every program website for all to access, explain each fee, discuss how to avoid each fee, and provide students with a web page that tells them how to use the account for free (which you’ve already found). Because of this, we believe that our customers pay less than half the amount in fees that the average bank checking account customer pays per year.
Two of the fees you referenced in your blog are the PIN fee and the Abandoned Account Fee. The PIN fee is easily avoided by choosing a signature based transaction at the checkout. The majority of students uses it in this manner and is in turn protected by MasterCard’s Zero Liability Policy against fraudulent charges (a safer way of purchasing than a PIN based transaction). We do not have an inactivity fee on our fee schedule – we don’t penalize students who do not use their accounts. We do have an Abandoned Account Fee of up to $19, for those who have abandoned their accounts, but this has been charged to less than 1% of all OneAccount holders in our company’s history because of our proactive outreach plan.
Higher One offers no instruments of credit. As a matter of fact, we’re generally in favor of initiatives restricting students’ access to credit cards and promoting financial literacy. This is why we offer a full range of financial literacy resources along with the services we provide.
I particularly dislike the implication, here, that PIN-based transactions are unsafe. They’re not; they’re just less lucrative, in terms of interchange fees, than signature-based transactions.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake hall of shame
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake hall of shame
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake hall of shame
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake hall of shame
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
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robert shumake detroit
robert shumake detroit
robert shumake twitter
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake hall of shame
There are hundreds of guides out there on making money online, however, until now making money with Myspace has been a topic kept in the dark by many Myspace marketers. Why is this you ask? Because it is so easy. You don't even require a website, hosting, or any capital outlay. It is simply using the proven popularity of a social network to literally explode your target market, sales and earnings.
You won't believe how easy this is, so I'll get started.
Tip #1
Make Profiles - Set up a profile in a relatively popular zip code for a female between the ages of 18 and 23. Make the profile believable and detailed. It is relatively easy to set up profiles, just look on other people's profiles to build your own. Put up pictures of an attractive girl, and if possible put them in the actual profile page. If you have plenty of time on your hands you can also change the layout by going to one of the many layout pages on the net and picking something suitable. But remember, you are in this to make money on myspace, therefore, the less time you spend doing all this the better. Once you get the hang of it, it is easy to set up multiple profiles a day.
Tip #2
Now that you have your profiles ready you need to add friends to your list. This is where automation comes in handy to make money with myspace. There are many friend adding bots around, do a google search to find one, some even bypass the CAPTCHA code. There may even be some free ones by now. Add as many friends as possible each day, for each of the profiles you have established.
Tip #3
You want as many profiles with as many friends as possible. Myspace marketing and making money with myspace happens through sheer numbers if nothing else. You want to have as many friends as possible for it to work.
Tip #4
Forget about bulletins, they aren't effective for making money on myspace. Yes, they used to be useful, but when people have as many people as they do these days on their friends list, and with the amount of bulletins that are sent out, people have stopped reading and paying attention to bulletins.
Tip #5
Comments is where the money is on Myspace. Think about it this way; if you just messaged a person, it would get through to that one person. Yet if you post a comment on that persons profile, perhaps 10 more people will read it. The current limit for comments if 50 per day, but if you have for example 10 profiles, this is instantly increased to 500 a day. And if each of those 500 is read by just 10 people who view that persons profile, you have effectively targeted 5000 people a day! In a month this will be 150,000 people that you have connected with through only 10 profiles. Think of what you could do with 100 profiles!
Tip #6
Choose your product. This is perhaps the hardest part, as to make money with Myspace, you really need to experiment and see what works for you. Check out www.clickbank.com and www.cj.com for their affiliate programs. Promoting survey sites is a big winner cause everybody on Myspace loves filling out surveys. Yet by now Myspace may have been flooded with people pushing survey affiliates, so experiment with different programs and target your market with something you think they would enjoy. You can only make money with Myspace through seeing what sells, then pushing it to the limit. If you are not seeing results with one product, switch until you do.
Tip #7
Write a sales letter to your "friends" for posting in their Comments section. You don't want to sound like you are selling something, so leave your fancy sales push to the website you are sending them to. The best way to get people to click on your link is to write in normal day to day expression, and try to inform them of something without sounding like you are pushing a sale. For example, "hi, did you ask me about online jobs? Anyway if you did I thought you might be interested in this site, I'm earning around $20 for each survey I fill out. You pay a little bit to get started but it is pretty simple and easy to make money." If you follow this kind of template you should have more success than obvious pushing of sales. You want to sound like a friend trying to help someone out, and it is a turn off when people think you are trying to sell them something.
robert shumake detroit
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
robert shumake detroit
The openSUSE Build Service 2.1 released - openSUSE <b>News</b>
This iteration has enhanced the web user interface of openSUSE Build Service with features that were previously only in the osc command line client. It now allows submitting of packages to other projects, showing a history of changes ...
Unemployment Extension <b>News</b>
Unemployment Extension News.
<b>News</b> - Source: Beyonce Is Pregnant! - Moms & Babies - UsMagazine.com
She and Jay-Z will welcome their first child next spring, the new Us Weekly reports.
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