Like others in the industry, Kovacevich knows he must reinvent the bank to move it beyond its traditional dependence on low-margin fee income, lending and services.
They have resurrected an aging Oracle foe–Ingres, which uses database technology developed 32 years ago by two Berkeley scientists to target Oracle's biggest source of profit: the steady, high-margin fees it charges for regular upgrades and support.
Robinhood is meanwhile cutting its margin on fees passed on by banks or FedEx, so ACH reversal fees will drop from $30 to $9, overnight check delivery from $35 to $20 and overnight mail from $35 to $20. "What's really interesting is that this is the only clearing system built from scratch on modern technology in at least the last decade," Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev tells me.
Rights fees for the World Cup in the United States still trail by a wide margin the fees paid for the Olympics.
Lending margins and fees rose, while bad debts fell.
U.S. Bancorp of Minneapolis plans to rely on its fat lending margins and fee-generating businesses to weather the recession.
Because every BlackBerry user generates high-margin monthly fees from carriers for RIM, the last quarter's loss of subscribers is more than just a symbolic setback.
While that result represented a 44percentt decline from the same period a year earlier, it nonetheless exceeded most forecasts and left investors impressed by the company's ability to offset hefty credit losses with higher lending margins and fees.
In fact, by the time loose monetary policy and lack of supervision made leverage seemingly irresistible, margins and fees of financial institutions had been under severe pressure for decades due to globalization and a multitude of other potent forces.
Other carriers will likely welcome it aboard in the future; though proportionately few users give mobile e-mail a try, their attempts still count as high-margin data fees, and carriers want to cast as wide a net as possible.
