Utah-headquartered Ally Bank today released the first two commercials in its new branding campaign. Under the umbrella of "Stages," the spots play up its customer-first focus — customers take center stage, highlighting human interaction over automation — with a new tagline, "Your money needs an ally." More details are in the press release, and check out the spots, which were filmed in on the stage of the historic Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, below.Continue reading...

Visa's high-profile TV campaign for the London 2012 Olympics, like the commercial featuring Michael Phelps, carry the tagline, "People everywhere go with Visa." But what that doesn't tell you is that people everywehere at the London Olympics go ONLY with Visa.

That's because every one of the ATMs at the Olympic games accepts only Visa cards. It gets worse: There are only eight — count 'em, eight — ATMs across all of the London Olympic venues, according to the UK's This is Money. In fact, an agreement with Visa led to the removal or disabling of twenty-seven other ATMs.

Basically, that means anyone attending the Olympics without a Visa card needs to bring cash. To speed purchases — in keeping with the brand's London 2012 ambassador Usain Bolt — Visa instituted a contactless payment system, so visitors can wave their Visa card at a payment terminal to get food and souvenirs, or in one a few of London's iconic black cabs.

But on July 29 at Wembley, where Great Britain was playing the United Arab Emirates in football, aka soccer, the system went down. As a result even Visa cardholders were left out in the cold — which is not entirely unusual for Londoners to feel, but still.Continue reading...

On Day 10 of the London Olympics, Nissan on Monday unveiled its vision for the future of the city's iconic 'black cab' and its 300,000 daily users - the Nissan NV200 London Taxi. Taxi versions of the NV200 have already been unveiled in Tokyo and New York, where it's billed as the "Taxi of Tomorrow."

The NV200 London Taxi will offer significantly reduced CO2 outputs compared to current taxi models, in line with London Mayor Boris Johnson's Air Quality strategy for London. An all-electric e-NV200 concept is also set to undergo trials in the Capital.Continue reading...

Google released this video ode to how it's reinventing the wallet with Google Wallet for mobile the same day it announced it's moving to the cloud and supporting all major U.S. credit and debit cards (ending its exclusive Citi partnership) — and on the day it killed its 506,000+ follower strong Google Mobile Twitter feed. The Google Mobile Blog is also pushing followers to the Google Android blog, where the details on today's news can be found.

Most North Americans will know the Capital One campaign that always ends with the tagline, "what's in your wallet?" Now we know what's not in Capital One's wallet: $210 million, the amount of a government-imposed settlement for pressuring and deceiving card holders into buying products they could not use and did not want.

It’s the first case enacted since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created by the Dodd-Frank bill passed by Congress two years ago to protect taxpayers and strengthen the financial industry against a repeat of the 2008 crisis which cost the United States 10 million jobs and $17 trillion in household wealth.Continue reading...

Facebook wants to become your job board of choice and your online bank, as it vies to drive engagement, utility and users' virtual homepage on the web and mobile.

The social network is supporting an innovative app (now in beta) from Australia's Commonwealth Bank, which would enable customers to make payments to third parties and Facebook friends on the site, using its own authentication system, as it currently does for its online customers and its CommBank Kaching mobile app users.

"There are certain things, whether itʼs financial services, or banking where I donʼt necessarily want my friends to know exactly what Iʼm doing, right? I want to be able to go in and have an experience with my advisor or my bank and have that be a one-on-one experience," said David Robinson, Facebook's director of global marketing solutions, U.S. financial services, to Fortune.

While Facebook declined to confirmed other banks it's working on virtual banking services with, a spokesperson did comment to Fortune: "Facebook is a platform and a partnership company. We are supportive of brands and agencies, across industries, using the platform to better serve their customers."Continue reading...

In an "ugly" day for the Barclays brand and the banking sector, WSJ's Dennis Berman and David Reilly discuss (above) the departures of Barclays CEO Bob Diamond (who faces a British parliamentary grilling on Wednesday) and COO Jerry del Missier and other scandals that have plagued the world's biggest banks.

Finger-pointing aside, Bloomberg looks at whether this opens the door to Barclays splitting its consumer lending and investment banking divisions. U.S. regulators today released "living wills" — contingency plans for breaking up nine of the world's biggest banks in the event of an emergency.Continue reading...

Citi released a video today promoting that in May, Citibank became the first bank in the world to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for 200 projects from the U.S. Green Building Council. The brand rose two places on Interbrand's just-released Best Global Green Brands ranking with the comment:

Citi Group improves on this year’s ranking by 2 spots, now sitting at #44. While the banking institution continues to navigate turbulent waters due to global economic conditions, Citi managed to increase the public’s perception of its environmental efforts, thus closing its perception/performance gap significantly since last year’s assessment. More recently, Citi joined forces with Google to finance a large wind energy center in California and embarked on a joint venture with SunPower to finance residential solar lease projects. The financial institution still remains in the latter portion of the ranking, partially due to its large-scale investments in coal industries, which contribute heavily to climate change effects.