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Online
Financial Services
GE
Capital Corporation has joined with CompuBank, an Internet bank, to
provide a financial supermarket on the Internet. The site may be reached
at www.gefn.com. Presently, the site
offers access only to checking and savings accounts and bill-paying
facilities. The site will probably be offering various types of
insurance in the coming months. Typical customers are between the ages
of 25 and 54, with household incomes in the range of $50,000 to $75,000.
According to David Frankel, senior vice president of
E-commerce, “What you are going to see is financial services players
rounding out a full array of financial services that they are going to
offer from their web site, by either acquiring companies or with joint
ventures.” Rather than compete on the basis of price, Frankel’s
approach is to rely on the favorable image of GE’s brand name to
market its financial services. In the long run, GE plans to provide each
customer on the GE web site with a consolidated monthly profile of his
or her financial position. To accomplish this end, GE will need to gain
the authorization of their customers to obtain these data from other
suppliers of financial services. The end product would be analogous to
financial compilations using Quicken software and would, of course,
require unquestioned privacy for consumers.
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