Jason O’Donnell from Bluestone Financial Institutions Fund has a cool job. He’s CIO for a hedge fund, working with investors with over $2M net worths on buying banks. If anyone knows the future of banking, it’s Jason.
So, we’ll ask him how banks can stop being so….awful. We’ll pick his brain on banking mergers, on dwindling services and on how people will interface with their banker. We’ll also talk about ease of borrowing money, banks getting hacked, which size banks are going to be the big winners, and how your phone will be right in the middle of how you interact with your bank (even more than today).
But that isn’t all….OG & Joe share yet another REIT horror story and talk about the quest for higher dividends….is it helping marketers create some new investments that might not be in our best interest? PK discusses taxes on Fractional Sense….Doug has trivia, and we talk about an oldie-but-goodie flick (does anyone say that anymore?): Running Brave.
Thanks to MagnifyMoney.com for sponsoring the podcast.
SHOW NOTES
<> Open
<> MagnifyMoney.com – Head to StackingBenjamins.com/MagnifyMoney when comparing your checking, savings and credit cards. Thanks to MagnifyMoney for sponsoring our podcast!
<>Newsreel Headlines
<> Jason O’Donnell – The Future of Banking
Jason’s fund: Bluestone Financial Institutions Fund
<> PK’s Fractional Sense – Tax Time….Behind Us!
<> Your Letters
– 401k – Pre tax or Roth?
<> End Show/Movies
An oldie for runners: Running Brave
Jason O’Donnell was a good interview and very informed about banking in general, however when he states that Apple Pay makes banking safer I think he jumped the gun. While I think Apple Pay *will* eventually do that, currently it is allowing a significant bump in fraud (he stated that he got hit in the past few months as have many of my friends and myself). The reason is that when a skimmer is used or a point of sale device is hacked that information typically would need to be loaded onto a dummy card. With Apple Pay it can be loaded onto an old iphone device (something criminals have much easier access to). You will hear the “fanboys” say that this is the banks fault… and they are absolutely right that they do share the blame, but Apple could and should be doing more to put stricter requirements on the banks. (stricter requirements is not something apple has ever shied away from in the past). These could include any number of things such as requiring the banks to use 2 factor authentication before allowing a card to be approved. They could also do more intelligent checks against the iphone account itself. Does the name/address match? Was it just created in the last couple days? Geographically is the device itself in the area of the customers billing zip? I have no doubt there are people who work at apple that are smarter than I am that could come up with even more methods to lock down this process or at the very least make it inconvenient for a criminal.
For Roth 401ks, the employer doesn’t care where you put your money, but I think they do care where they put their money.The company match must to go into a pretax account per IRS rules: http://www.irs.gov/Retirement-Plans/Retirement-Plans-FAQs-on-Designated-Roth-Accounts#10
Great point, and one we didn’t cover adequately on the show (that THEIR match will be pre-tax…..). Thanks for the note. We’ll circle back to that on a future episode and clarify.