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What country, and what bank?

1) US
2) Now that I'm investigating, it appears a lot of banks offer pretty much this same service. Some, as "Late Adopter" noted above, don't charge a fee for International transfers if you hold a high enough balance or account level.

Not quite. http://www.hsbc.com/hsbc/about_hsbc/group-history
The history shows that the bank is anything but the basically the Chinese National Bank. It is currently listed in London IIRC

As a HSBC internet banking user, I can safely say you'd be locked out long before your ninth attempt, hell; four locked me out when I last forgot my IB code. Being locked out is something you can only fix by visiting your local branch and using your password to unlock the account again.
The number of attempts is not given, but the automatic lockout is at least covered at their security page
Sorry Cardiff University, no bank hax for you today.

If you are going to need that money at the end of college (say 4 years) mutual funds are dangerous. Overall they do 10% or better, but over the course of any given time they may lose money. Index funds are a little safer and generally they out perform most mutual funds (since there are no brokerage fees).

CDs aren't bad either, they are safe and do better than most savings accounts, but they tie up your money. The best option I've found is hsbc online savings accounts. I don't work for HSBC, but at a guaranteed 5%, how can you go wrong? Plus it is variable interest rates, so if interest rates go up, so does your interest rate. I put a few grand in there and it started at 4%, it is up to 5.05% now. Of course the rate could go down, but it'd be surprising to see it go below what normal savings accounts give - plus if it does you can withdraw all your money electronically. The catch is that it is an entirely online account - no atm cards, no branches to withdraw - you must deposit and withdraw entirely online. But nowadays that is hardly an issue if you have another bank account that supports online transfers.

I prefer HSBC; I think it behaves legally and ethically, unlike Citibank.

Original AC.

The closest we have to this are the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. I can't be certain, but these may well be verified in the form of pop-ups from Visa/MasterCard's servers so that the business doesn't get that information.

I'm getting an online store off the ground and we redirect to HSBC to collect credit card details via their Secure ePayments service. Customers feel more secure with the HSBC logo and the guarantee that we don't collect any details ourself. If you encounter a similar service (WorldPay, PayPal) where the shop itself doesn't collect details, you can shop safely in the knowledge that the company you're doing business with has no access to your card details.

Nationwide Building Society requires users to enter random characters from their passcode via drop downs. The combination of random characters and the drop downs is quite a good protection against key logging attacks.

HSBC's Corporate & Institutional Banking Service uses a 'virtual keyboard' to make keylogging attacks more difficult (though not impossible). Click the 'Register' link to see it in use in their registration process.

Of course, both these approaches make the assumption that users are prepared to undergo some extra 'pain' for the benefit of the additional security.

I work for HSBC Bank and in the department I work in we use "IBM Browser" which is a crippled Mozilla. (Seen from about:config) We have over 400 machines in the building.

The replies to this message apparently are very skewed towards those that receive little or no training, or of training with little quality. I'd like to add a counter balance to that.

My background: I've been a trainer for two years for a small training & consulting company out of New York (though I've since moved on). I've trained (and consulted) globally, with my courses ranging from beginner to advanced Java, C++, Web Services, XML/XSLT, J2EE, EJB, and most recently the Microsoft 2-day VS.NET seminars. I've taught principal engineers and developers of products you may have heard of, as well as various other companies.

Is training worth it? It depends. The main benefits of training vs. books are:
a) you can't ask a book a question
b) books can't help you when their examples don't compile
c) you'd like to get an answer to that gnatty problem you've been experiencing in that DLL you've been screwing with for 3 days (i.e. free consulting advice)
d) some authors really can't write
e) some technologies are so new or specialized there isn't much in the way of quality books out there (i.e. advanced oracle performance tuning, advanced J2EE architecture, writing for an EAI framework like TIBCO, etc.)

Training is a way of imparting knowledge that the books have IN CONTEXT of the real world AND providing the extra knowledge that the books don't have.

Most training sucks, of course, because
a) it's not relevant to your day-to-day job
or
b) the buyer doesn't know what constitutes good training.

This really harkens back to the scourge of the land of IT: a lack of good managers. It's up to managers to know what training is needed & whether the vendor is of sufficient quality. It's also up to the managers to involve the team with this decision -- I fully agree with the premise of this article that those being trained should influence the training -- if you're not seen as being competent enough to know what you need, there's a real reality-deficiency occurring.

Given the above, what makes a good instructor for technical courses? IMHO, in order:
a1) advanced technical knowledge & expertise
a2) good teaching skills
b) patience
c) energy (you have to carry the crowd through the tough parts)
d) humility (you can sometimes be wrong)

They're all needed, though at bare minimum A1 & A2... if you have teaching skills but don't know much, you're not accomplishing anything except entertaining/babysitting a crowd for a few days. In an advanced crowd this will generate a lot of anger. Conversely, if you know a lot but have the communication skills of a potato chip, you'll still get a lot of angry people wanting to give you the boot.

Having said that, a good course with a good instructor can be a very rewarding experience, probably a major highlight of your career growth -- assuming you get the right course for the right reasons with a good instructor.

In perspective, a 5 day course can run between $1-3k a person, depending on the depth, level, and reputation of the instructor. That's not cheap. It's probably only worth it to go with the "world class" instructors, whether well known (like the folks at DevelopMentor, or Hotsos), or relatively unknown but promising (like my old company).

As for what industries regularily offer training -- generally in my experience, financial and insurance companies. There's always ongoing training there for new technologies, and most new IT hires get 4-12 weeks of training in business and technology.

Oh right I didn't realise that, sorry :'-( cool, thanks. I still think a cheque is better just because everyone fills in loads of cheques all the time though, that's how I'm selling my shareware - I tell everyone to use Bloomberg's currency calculator to work out how much my software will cost in their currency, add 10%, that's it. A cheque issued by a foreign bank is no problem apart from the fees and exchange rate (usually small - look at currency futures exchange).

I'll bet HSBC are pretty p*ssed - they're owed about $2 billion.

Of course, you're all forgetting one of the largest trials of electronic cash performed so far. You should have heard of Mondex - an electronic cash system co-developed by BT , Midland Bank (now HSBC)> and others. They have an electronic card which uses a smart chip to actually store the cash. You can get electronic "wallets" with which you can exchange cash with other private individuals. Shops have have more permanently fixed card readers. You can lock the card with strong encryption (hello US :-) so that others cant get at your cash even if you loose your card - to use it again you have to "unlock" it, and just like a mobile phone, it can be set to only authenticate with your own "wallet" so someone else can't even try cracking it. Using BT's specially developed telphones, you can withdraw money from the bank without leaving your home and you can also deposit it aswell. Anyone who is interested in this, I wrote a report on mondex several years ago when the Swidon trial took place. Unfortunately it's in M$ word format as my university hasn't embraced Linux yet and their sun's are laughably inequiped with decent word/text processing capabilities. Anyways, if you're interested - it has lots of pretty pictures :-) anyone who mails mondex-request@periscope-systems.freeserve.co.uk will receive a copy - that is if I can find it :-)