bank the taiko..

these days... seems like the ICT market is pretty bad in Malaysia.. the bank are the taiko now.

we see credit card easy payment scheme mushrooming room just anywhere and some are coming with zero interest rates and etc..

the business model is simple:
1. Customer will use credit card to pay the vendor.
2. As soon as transaction is approved, vendor will get full amount from the bank.
3. Bank will take it as investment while waiting for the interest to come, when customers don't pay back installment in full.

recently, BCB (Bumiputra Commerce Bank) announced to launch SwiswaCare Scheme by 1st July 2005 where those under sponsor of tertiary scholarship will be eligible to buy laptop from vendors with 5 years installment period and monthly payment of only less than RM 10.00

The vendors involved are:
1. HP
2. NEC
3. Benq

of course Dell Computers and FTec are not part of it because this is not a direct marketing approach.

This is a good move. The concepts are as follows:
1. Those given scholarship will have money for other things.
2. The money could be coming from their parents, which initially prepared it for the tuition fees instead.

That is why, they also package it with a risk protection policy where should something happen to the parents, the whole deal would be secured, means an amount of money would be given to customers (to pay back the loan of the laptop) when death or TPD happened to their parent. They called this parentCare. Since children has no insurable interest to the parent, probably this is scheme is done from the other way round, means parents will secure the loan on behalf of the children.

Laptops will come with fully installed Star Office ? why not OpenOffice ? Perhaps this is results of failed negotiation with Microsoft for its office product and probably organizers just wanted to avoid piracy issues.

I am guessing that in the future, OpenOffice would be used as a benchmark for public programs to avoid piracy issues. When you mention OpenOffice, nobody would doubt anything and the program will endorse given a clean-cut image.

BCB has allocated a total of RM100 million for this scheme.

------------------evalet------------------
1. who is the industry driver ?
2. what is HP, NEC,Benq up to lately?
3. what is the impact of OpenOffice ?
4. what growth is there for ICT marketing ?
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