Research Into The External Environment Of Barclays Bank Finance Essay

Research Into The External Environment Of Barclays Bank Finance Essay Barclays is a global financial services provider deals with retail and commercial banking, credit cards, investment banking, wealth management and investment management services all over the world. Barclays offers personal banking services to its customers all over the world and provides a variety of other products like loans, debit card, saving account, insurance, online banking etc. 1.1 AIMS/PURPOSES The purpose of this report is to review recent research into the external environment of Barclays Bank and provide strategic recommendations for senior managers of the organisation. 1.2 CONTEXT Barclays started its business from london 300 years back, and now Barclays has established enterprises across Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region and gives employment to approximately 145,000 people. Barclays has almost 49 million customers and clients worldwide. Barclays has so many achievements in his name. In 1958 Barclays appointed the UKs first female branch manager. In 1961 Barclays opened the UKs first computer center for banking. In 1966 Barclays launches Barclays card, Uks first credit card. In 1967 Barclays opened worlds first ATM. In 1986 Barclays was the first British bank to have shares listed on New York Stock Exchange. In 1987 Barclays launched Barclays connect, the UKs first debit card. In 1995 Barclays was the first financial institution to launch its website. In 1999 Barclays was the first UK bank to offer customers a mortgage in euros to buy a british home. In 2008 Barclays was the first bank in UK to announce a mass roll-out of contactless-enabled debit card. (Barclays, 2010) 1.3 STRUCTURE OF THE REPORT The first part of this report would examine and analyse the external environment of Barclays Bank, while the second part would give recommendations to mitigate its impact on the internal environment looking at what management structure and strategy that could be used. The final pact of the report would give a conclusion on the findings and limitations of the reports findings. 2.0 EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT Macro (External) Factors are seemingly uncontrolled by companies. They include factors like Political Factors, Economic and Competition Factors, Social Factors, Technological Factors and Legal Factors. Since Barclays Bank comes in Macro Factors, its strategic planning must include an analysis for Macro Factors. This purpose of report both includes SWOT and PEST analysis of tools. 2.1 POLITICAL FACTORS The Political Factors of a Bank includes measures of government stability and political risk in that country. Banking Sectors are affected by political factors and government rules and regulations, and as Barclays Bank one of the historical bank and has branches all over the world, expected to bond with government rules and feel the heat of politics in business and at time political factors doesnt allow banks to grow its business. For example the tax for Barclays to do its business in India will not be same as it is in UK. And also different-different country has different- different rules for its banking industry. According to Treanor report Senior bankers are complaining that political interference is the biggest risk facing their industry despite the billions of pounds of taxpayer money being used to prop up the banking system. One of the bankign leader at Pwc said With political interference as the top risk and too much regulation at number three, the concern is that the financial crisis has taken the banking industrys future out of its own hands.(Treanor,2010) Barclays president Bob Diamond also opposed political interference in banking sector. (Treanor, 2010) The UK Prime Minister said for a more responsible banking, in which he said banks are the servants of economy and society and never its master. He said banks should have help UK business by giving them loans. (BBC, 2009) 2.2 ECONOMIC AND COMPETITION FACTORS Due to the large number of banks in market, Barclays Bank is facing a huge competition in market. Barclays was rapidly losing market share to Bank of Scotland and mainland European banks according to survey by the Manchester Business School.(Trapp,1992) Bank of Scotland was regarded as the toughest bank, but it is felt to offer a better service. Smaller banks, such as the Co-op, Abbey National, Bank of Wales and Yorkshire, were considered less aggressive than the main hight street clearers in terms of fees and pricing. (Trapp, 1992) The Independent (2009) report says Barclays Bank faced a new challenge as credit ratings Moodys cut its rating by two full notches, leading to a one-tenth fall in its share price. (Robbins,2009) The existing recession also played a major role in affecting the business of banks. In 2008, Barclays profit fell by 14% while variable remuneration fell by 48%. At all level Barclays employees lost in  £2bn of personal wealth in 2007 and 2008. (BBC NEWS,2009) 2.3 SOCIAL FACTORS Social factor plays a major role in banks development and banks enterprise. Bank should win the heart of its customers to maintain its reputation. It should make a strong bond with customers. According to BBC News report, in April 2000 Barclays closed its 171 branches, many of them were in rural areas. Because of that Barclays had suffered from a spate of bad publicity. (BBC NEWS, 2000) On February, 2010 increasing overdraft charges on two million of its account holders created a bit concern for Barclays bank customers. However Barclays said eight million customers with standard current accounts would not be a hit by higher changes, and banks has not changed the rates paid by its credit card customers in UK. However customers reacted angrily against Barclays bank. (Moore,2010) 2.4 TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS The modern Technology which making customers life easy in banks, creating big problem regarding the security and privacy of their account details. Customers face problem in loging on and doing online banking. Many customers in country side areas dont have much knowledge about online banking, bill payments and online transfer funds. Some Customers feel unsecured doing online banking. In January 2010 many account holders were not able to check balances and transfer money via online banking. Many customers complained on Barclays forum for unable to access account. (Anker, 2010) Customers who logged into their account in July, 2000 they were able to read the details of other customers accounts. Barclays admitted the problem was associated with a software upgrade which went live overnight. (BBC NEWS, 2000) Barclays bank has signed a deal with F-Secure for 1.6 million licences of the anti-virus program. The basic F-Secure anti-virus will protect customers account and will alert users if any malicious programs installed. 2.5 LEGAL AND CREADIBILITY FACTORS Banks are regulated by different different agencies and different kind of laws in different countries. In 1990s, European countries have implemented Single Banking License which allowed banks from European Union (EU) countries to branch freely into other EU countries. European Countries implemented numerous regulations for banking industry, to achieve the level of harmonization required for the establishment of a single, competitive market for financial services. However, after that European banks have also experienced a negative effect on competition. (Angelini, 2003) UK government expected to put pressure on Barclays and other lenders that have turned down government help to join the British Treasurys latest effort to revive the economy. (Werdigier, 2009). In March, 2009 Barclays bank obtained a court order banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax. The information was leaked by a person who was working with bank. (Guardian, 2009) In January, 2006 Barclays and other 22 international companies got a legal action brought by a South African activist group. That legal action was for allegedely benefited companies from doing business in South Africa in the apartheid era. Barclays was forecd to pull out of South Africa in 1986 after protests against its involvement in South Africa during the apartheid regime. (Kollewe, 2006) 3.0 RECOMMENDATIONS Bank should make a strong bond with customers, to make its business and reputation profitable. Bank should should give customers requirement first priority in its business. T 3.1 As mentiond in the first part of the report, how political factor is playing a major role in banks business and growth. Different- different countris political stability plays a major role in banks deveopment. Banks should keep a track in advance on the political stability of that country, to know how its political change will affect its business. And bank should make a strong bond with governemnt regarding its policies and regulations so that government will help the banks at the time of economy downturn by giving banks special packages to rescue from economy downturn. Banks should make a strong bond with government regarding tax paying. 3.2 Economic and competition factor also plays a major role in affecting banks growth. As mentioned in 2.2 how competition in market plays a major role in companys share and profit and how that nation economy plays a major role in the growth and development of bank. Banks should involve Fiscal Policy in their policy. Fiscal Policy helps to reduce the rate of inflation and stimulate economic growth in a period of economy downturn. Fiscal Policy aims to stablise economic growth, avoiding boom and bust economic cycle.(Economics help) For competition factor playing a major role in banks growth. Banks should keep a strong policy on its interest rates which should not affect customers requirement and banks benefit both. 3.3 As mentioned in 2.3 Social Factor plays a major role in banks relations with customers which directly affects banks development and reputation. Banks responsibility towards customers plays a major role in banks reputation in market, which affects its business. Banks should give a written letter in advance to customers before taking any major step. Banks should make its customer care department more friendly for customers, so they will not hesitate asking any question to banks.Before increasing its any fee, banks should inform customers in advance. The significance of good customer service costs five times to win a new customers and retaining old customers. And banks should give assurance to customers regarding their funds and account profile and personal details, so that they will more secure regarding their accounts. To inhance its reputatin banks should participate in social causes and should participate in developing poor countries and rural areas. They should make branches an d ATMs more convinent for customers in countryside areas as well. 3.4 Technological factor which causing a big concern in winning the trust of customers. The modern technology which is making a customers life easy in doing online bill payments or accessing accounts online at time creat big problems for customers. As mentioned in 2.4 how at time online banking is creating problems for customers and creating problems in relationship with banks. Banks should make its online banking more secured and also give assurance to customers regarding their account details so that customers will not worry about their account profile. Banks should educate people regarding its online banking and telephonic banking. Bank will have to make international banking or internatioanl funds transfer safe for customers and for this they will have educate customers. As mentioned in 2.4, Barclays bank has signed a deal with F-Secure for licence of an anti-virus program which will protect customers account and will alert users if something go wrong with their account.(BBC News ,2006). Its banks responsibility to make technology secured regarding customers account, and if something happens wrong bank must insure customers that their money is safe. 3.5 For a good business banks should start using social media to build trust, loyalty and improve relationships with customers. Political Factor is palying a major role in Banks international market and bank Barclays protects money for nearly 14 million customers and clients in Africa during the time of economy and climate risk. Barclays operated in Africa for over a century and optimisitc for next 100 years future. http://group.barclays.com/Editorial/1231783315133.html CONCLUSION STRENGHTHS WEAKNESSES OPPORTUNITIES THREATS Widespread global presence Generated controvecies Well-established historically Associated with innovation http://www.businessteacher.org.uk/business-resources/swot-analysis-database/barclays-bank-swot-analysis/

Post Colonial India English Drama

English Literature Eng 102 Term Paper II Topic: Post-Colonial Indian English Drama India has the longest and the richest tradition in drama. During the age of the Vedic Aryans, drama was performed in a simple way. Different episodes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad-Gita were enacted out in front of people. When Britishers came in India, the crippled Indian drama regained its strength. In 1920, a new drama in almost all the Indian languages came to the fore, it was a drama largely influenced by prevailing movements like Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and surrealism.Indian drama got a new footing when kendriya Natak Sangeet Akadmi was started in January 1953. National school of drama set up Sangeet Natak Akadami in 1959 was another development. The year 1972 was a landmark year for Indian theatre. Badal Sircar, vijay tendulkar and girish karnad have contributed to the modernization of the face of the Indian theatre, these play wrights have made bold innovations and fruitf ul experiments. Postcolonial Writings as we have observed, emphasize the process of strong resistance in the societies and also put emphasis on the reality of life.It deals with the literature written by the people of colonized countries that take the suffering and survival and resistance of their people as their subject matter. Postcolonial Writings can be considered as the historical marker of the period because it deals the literature which comes after decolonization as well as it is considered as an embodiment of intellectual approaches. At the intellectual level Postcolonial writers engaged themselves in opening up the possibilities of a new language and a new way of looking towards the world.Their writings can be taken as a medium of resistance to the former colonizer. Their themes are focused on the subject matters like identity, national and cultural heritage, border crossing, contemporary reality and situation, human relationship and emotions etc. In the Indian context, Pos tcolonial writing makes its presence felt in the English-speaking world by giving new themes and techniques. The rise of Postcolonial Indian English writing was a significant aspect of Indian English literature.If we talk about the different genre of Postcolonial Indian English literature, drama became one of the best mediums for expression. Postcolonial Indian English poets make use of current situation in the society to give their poetry a Indian flavor. The new phase of Indian theatrical development happily coincides with the personal development of Girish Karnad as a dramatist. His contribution goes beyond theatre: he has directed feature films, documentaries, and television serials. He represented India in foreign lands as an emissary of art & culture.He has experimented with the fusion of the traditional and modern dramatic forms and content. Pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial experiences in literature cannot be compartmentalized in true sense. They are not divorced from each other. His play ‘Tughlaq’ was a reflection of the changing times- the narrowing of the great divide between the rulers and ruled. Karnad reminds us of T. P. Kailasam and Rangacharya who go back to myths and legends to show the modern life with all its elemental passions and man’s struggle to achieve perfection.If creating new themes and techniques is a part of Postcolonial writing, Shiv K. Kumar can be truly called a Postcolonial poet. Winner of Sahitya Academi Award with various books of poetry, drama, short story and translation, Shiv K. Kumar gave an identity and a sense of direction to Indian English poetry in the Postcolonial period. His knowledge of Indian myths and Indian history is amazing and he uses them as themes in his poetry. But the most appealing aspect of his poetry is that it gives a distinct touch to Indian sensibility.Other than this, themes like East-West encounter, Indian landscape, national identity, contemporary reality he takes all t hese as his themes in his poetry which give the whole essence of Postcoloniality. In his Award winning book of verse, Trapfalls in the Sky (1987), we can see Kumar’s seeking for the national and cultural identity. As a Postcolonial poet, Kumar makes an attempt to come to terms with contemporary reality which is integrated with Indian landscape.Kumar’s dealing with national and transnational themes indicates his open mind and his approach towards life. Like many of the poets of Postcolonial era, Kumar tries to write authentically about the performances of rituals, superstitions prevailing in Indian society. Kumar is considered one the most outstanding poets of Modern Indian English Literature, who has the credit to give the recognition, Modern Indian poets got in the world of English Literature. Kumar is a poet who is known for his portrayal of India and its different aspects in very a beautiful way.But another picture of India is seen in a very different way in his poe try when we see the hidden reality of religion prevailing in India As the most important element of Postcolonial literature is the sense of national identity, consciousness of the richness of the cultural heritage of motherland and its wealth of natural resources. Twenty years after Independence, R. K. Narayan was still tackling issues of colonialism. The Vendor of Sweets  (1967) takes us through the tensions integral to a family in which two generations belong to two different cultures.Ascetic Jagan belongs to an old India of family and history his son to an India increasingly subject to the foregrounding of the commodity and a dramatic industrialization. Narayan explores the inevitable clash of what is, in many ways, both a colonial and a post-colonial encounter: Jagan, a follower of Gandhi and a veteran of the wars against British Imperialism, must attempt a negotiation of an ethos invasive to his own definitions of nationality; Mali, without this structure, must reconcile an A merican capitalism with India's own sense of what constitutes a modern nation.This theme is continued in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's  Heat and Dust  (1975). Again two generations, this time British, must come to terms with an alien culture. Whilst Olivia's adventures are romanticized, Jhabvala attempts to explore in a more sophisticated manner the social outlay of Anglo-Indian relations with the higher Muslim classes and Olivia's step-grand-daughter is confronted with an India that remains hidden in the works of Kipling, Forster or Narayan. Leelavati the beggar-woman's life, if not her behavior, demonstrates an unusual social awareness of the lowest castes.It is to be noted that the East-West dichotomy within the later generation has become less strained: modern Britain is expected now to accept India on its own terms. Salman Rushdie, whose work has been produced in the eighties and nineties, has removed himself from the sites of both nationality and naturalism but remains in an enga gement with economic colonialism and its consequences. Midnight's Children  (1982) critiques the post-Independence political strategies of Nehru and Indira Gandhi.Critique and critiqued demonstrate an India which has not yet fully resolved the dramatic industrialization necessary to the creation of a modern nation: Rushdie's response is necessarily part of the same Western political agenda as Nehru's or Mrs. Gandhi. Modern Indian English drama has set a significant tradition for new literature in postcolonial period. Writers skate over their experiences those are either socially rooted or floating. They perceive the incongruous situation of life and experience. Hence they ventilate a kind of ironical expression in their verbal expressions.Indian English Drama after Independence has no relationship with drama written earlier. He categorized the pre-Independence Indian English Drama as â€Å"greasy, weak spinned and purple adjectived†. They express themselves in an alien lang uage (global code), which in spite of all sociolinguistic forces for broad-based Indianization fails to transmute or authenticate a local space as effectively as any Indian language. It creates room for a certain cultural, historical and linguistic distancing from the colonizer’s code. In the sociolinguistic domain, in the hands of Indian English Writers, the Queen (the global code) is wearing a  bindi. local colour). Indian English Writers are after all the members of the communities comprising the Indian population spread over a continuum. It’s a tough ask for the writers to restrict their individual regional impulses suffering to their own community to become intelligible by the other communities written the geo-national space of India. Indian English dramatist did not use Indian Dramatic traditions and myths creatively. Another major reason was that English as a second language was not suitable medium of expression for two Indians doing conversations.So Indian pl aywrights could not make their Indian characters speak in English. The language barrier prevents the lower classes from coming to the Indian English Theatre. Actually to form our culture identity we need tradition, continuity and change. It is only when we accept these three things that we can really have a theatre movement which is completely linked to the development of cultural social and individual identity. Only then we can achieve harmony through the language of theatre which must necessarily be filled with a sense of rootedness revealing a true Indian sensibility.

Foreign Policy During World War II - 847 Words

Foreign policy, in its most general sense, is the relations of one country to another on the international stage. It can strengthen or destroy administrations, create or tarnish legacies, and ensue or conclude conflicts. But regardless, foreign policy contributes to the creation of significant and noteworthy history that future generations can create precedents from; this includes events and decisions that occurred in the twentieth century. Throughout this time, the United States was involved in numerous conflicts and made difficult decisions that impacted the international community in occasionally significant manners. Of these incidents, the three most important involvements by the United States in world affairs include: the U.S. entry into World War II with emphasis on the European Theatre, the U.S. bombings of Japan, and President Ronald Reagan’s â€Å"Tear Down this Wall† speech. On December 7th, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service bombed the U.S. nava l base of Pearl Harbor in the Hawaii Territory which resulted in multiple destroyed vessels, hundreds of lost aircraft, and over 2,300 human casualties (The WWII Museum). This was quickly followed by a U.S. declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. Then on December 11th, Adolf Hitler, Fà ¼hrer of Nazi Germany, declared war on the U.S. to honor his Tripartite Pact with Japan. This was countered on the same day by the U.S. with its own declaration of war against Germany (The History Place). As a result ofShow MoreRelatedAmerican Foreign Policy During World War II1565 Words   |  7 PagesAmerican foreign policy shifted drastically from the birth of the new nation to the beginning of the 20th century. 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Definition of Disambiguation in Language Studies

In linguistics, disambiguation is the process of determining which sense of a word is being used in a particular context. Also known as lexical disambiguation. In computational linguistics, this discriminative process is called word-sense disambiguation (WSD). Examples and Observations It so happens that our communication, in different languages alike, allows the same word form to be used to mean different things in individual communicative transactions. The consequence is that one has to figure out, in a particular transaction, the intended meaning of a given word among its potentially associated senses. While the ambiguities arising from such multiple form-meaning associations are at the lexical level, they often have to be resolved by means of a larger context from the discourse embedding the word. Hence the different senses of the word service could only be told apart if one could look beyond the word itself, as in contrasting the players service at Wimbledon with the waiters service in Sheraton. This process of identifying word meanings in a discourse is generally known as word sense disambiguation (WSD). (Oi Yee Kwong, New Perspectives on Computational and Cognitive Strategies for Word Sense Disambiguation. Springer, 2013) Lexical Disambiguation and Word-Sense Disambiguation (WSD) Lexical disambiguation in its broadest definition is nothing less than determining the meaning of every word in context, which appears to be a largely unconscious process in people. As a computational problem, it is often described as AI-complete, that is, a problem whose solution presupposes a solution to complete natural-language understanding or common-sense reasoning (Ide and VÃ ©ronis 1998). In the field of computational linguistics, the problem is generally called word sense disambiguation (WSD) and is defined as the problem of computationally determining which sense of a word is activated by the use of the word in a particular context. WSD is essentially a task of classification: word senses are the classes, the context provides the evidence, and each occurrence of a word is assigned to one or more of its possible classes based on the evidence. This is the traditional and common characterization of WSD that sees it as an explicit process of disambiguation with respect to a fixed inventory of word senses. Words are assumed to have a finite and discrete set of senses from a dictionary, a lexical knowledge base, or an ontology (in the latter, senses correspond to concepts that a word lexicalizes). Application-specific inventories can also be used. For instance, in a machine translation (MT) setting, one can treat word translations as word senses, an approach that is becom ing increasingly feasible because of the availability of large multi-lingual parallel corpora that can serve as training data. The fixed inventory of traditional WSD reduces the complexity of the problem, but alternative fields exist . . .. (Eneko Agirre and Philip Edmonds, Introduction. Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms and Applications. Springer, 2007) Homonymy and Disambiguation Lexical disambiguation is well suited particularly for cases of homonymy, for instance, an occurrence of bass must be mapped onto either of the lexical items bass1 or bass2, depending on the intended meaning. Lexical disambiguation implies a cognitive choice and is a task that inhibits comprehension processes. It should be distinguished from processes that lead to a differentiation of word senses. The former task is accomplished fairly reliably also without much contextual information while the latter is not (cf. Veronis 1998, 2001). It has also been shown that homonymous words, which require disambiguation, slow down lexical access, while polysemous words, which activate a multiplicity of word senses, speed up lexical access (Rodd e.a. 2002). However, both the productive modification of semantic values and the straightforward choice between lexically different items have in common that they require additional non-lexical information. (Peter Bosch, Productivity, Polysemy, and Predicate Indexicality. Logic, Language, and Computation: 6th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, ed. by Balder D. ten Cate and Henk W. Zeevat. Springer, 2007) Lexical Category Disambiguation and the Principle of Likelihood Corley and Crocker (2000) present a broad-coverage model of lexical category disambiguation based on the Principle of Likelihood. Specifically, they suggest that for a sentence consisting of words w0 . . . wn, the sentence processor adopts the most likely part-of-speech sequence t0 . . . tn. More specifically, their model exploits two simple probabilities: (i) the conditional probability of word wi given a particular part of speech ti, and (ii) the probability of ti given the previous part of speech ti-1. As each word of the sentence is encountered, the system assigns it that part-of-speech ti, which maximizes the product of these two probabilities. This model capitalizes on the insight that many syntactic ambiguities have a lexical basis (MacDonald et al., 1994), as in (3): (3) The warehouse prices/makes are cheaper than the rest. These sentences are temporarily ambiguous between a reading in which prices or makes is the main verb or part of a compound noun. After being trained on a large corpus, the model predicts the most likely part of speech for prices, correctly accounting for the fact that people understand price as a noun but makes as a verb (see Crocker Corley, 2002, and references cited therein). Not only does the model account for a range of disambiguation preferences rooted in lexical category ambiguity, it also explains why, in general, people are highly accurate in resolving such ambiguities. (Matthew W. Crocker, Rational Models of Comprehension: Addressing the Performance Paradox. Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones, ed. by Anne Cutler. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005)