Online Bank

Benefits Of Online Banking

More Free. Fast. Secure.

It's FREE. We don't charge for online banking or to pay bills online from a Bank checking account.

It's FAST. There's no complicated software to download or learn. Just register and set up your user name and password, and you're ready to go!

it's SECURE. You can bank online ecurity features are designed to guard your personal information. In the unlikely event that a fraudulent online banking transaction occurs while on our site

Reasons to sign up for Online Banking

Get account information at your convenience
Why wait for paper statements to balance your checkbook? With Personal Online Banking, you can:

• See account details for your eligible checking, savings, CD, loan, line of credit and mortgage accounts.
• Check account balances and payment history.
• Transfer funds between eligible Washington Mutual deposit accounts—and schedule future transfers.
• Download account information to Personal Financial Management software, such as Quicken® or Microsoft® Money.
• Save shredding time (and trees)—if you sign up to receive Online Statements, you can opt to stop getting paper statements in the mail.

Pay bills online—free of fees
Kick the check-writing habit—and kiss envelopes, stamps and stacks of paper goodbye. With our online Personal Bill Pay® service, you can:

• Pay virtually anyone in the United States from your eligible checking account.
• Schedule payments in advance—both one-time and recurring payments.
• Pay multiple bills quickly, from the same screen.
• See 18 months of your bill payment history.
• Get a great deal—no matter how many bills you pay each month, Personal Bill Pay service is free (subject to funds availability, of course).

Pay bills on time—guaranteed
You won't have to worry about bill payments being late with our Personal Bill Pay service. When you initiate your payment four business days before the due date, you get our On Time Guarantee. To take part, just remember to:

• Schedule the first Payment to each Payee four (4) business days before the due date.
• Schedule the next payments two (2) Business Days before the due date for a Payment that is made electronically and four (4) Business Days before the due date for a Payment made by check.
  * You will know whether the On Time Guarantee is two (2) business days or four (4) business days before the due date by the Estimated Due Date (Deliver By Date) shown at the time you schedule your payment. (Due date does not include grace period, if any).
• Provide accurate payment instructions.
• Make sure you have available funds in your account to cover the payment.
• Not make a "restricted" payment, such as a court-ordered tax, securities settlement or international payment.

Please see our Online Banking Terms & Conditions for full details.

Service your accounts
No more mail, phone calls or trips to the bank to service your accounts. Instead, you can just log on to:

• Order new checks—even order different styles for your checking account!
• Stop a payment on a deposit account check.
• Order copies of checks or paper statements.
• Update your address.
• Send secure online messages to Washington Mutual.

Online Loans

Finding a loan

Online loans are common these days and often promise all sorts of benefits compared to the traditional high street bank loans. Just read on for our guide to online loans and how you can benefit from borrowing online.

The benefits of online loans

Lenders who do not have branches and only offer online loans often promise lower interest rates than high street banks and building societies. This is because they have fewer overheads and can pass their savings directly to their customers. Some high street banks also offer online loans, which work in the same way. Paying your monthly repayments by Direct Debit will often accompany a lower interest rate.

Online loans enable you to check your current balance online. Updating or changing details is also often far easier as you do not have to go into your local branch, you simply have to go online, log in and enter your new details.

Compare all the online loans around and save money

Once you've had a look at what's around, you'll need to compare the online loans available to discover which one is best for you. Some online loans offer an APR of around 6%, but with others you could pay over 30% on your borrowed cash. It's worth shopping around to make sure you're making the right choice.

Online Stock Trading

The Benefits Of Online Stock Market Trading

Regardless of whether you are an experienced stock trader or new to trading stock, you may never have experienced the joy of stock trading online. If that's the case, and you are currently thinking of trading online, you may want to know what all the fuss is about! To help you understand, the following are just some of the benefits of online stock market trading:

Commissions
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, benefit of trading stocks online is the reduced stock broker commissions you�ll be expected to pay. In most cases, when trading stock online, brokers will charge you a commission of between $7 and $10 per trade. However, if you trade in sufficiently large enough volume, it is possible for you to negotiate with your broker so that these brokers� fees can be as low as $0.01 of the transaction value.

Control
When you use a broker in the real world you may find that your broker will not agree to execute a trade, believing your decision to buy or sell the stock in question is flawed. When you trade stock online this is no longer a problem, your broker has no input as to when you buy and sell stock � you do!

Portfolio
In the real world some brokers will not buy certain stock � for example, some penny stocks. This may limit the stock you are able to have as part of your investment portfolio. However, when you trade online, subject to availability, you can trade in any stock - on any stock exchange - you want!

Information
With the use of computer software programs, you can use stock charts, technical indicators and real time stock prices to help you make the investment decision you want to make, when you want to make it.

Time
One of the essential elements about trading stock is the time it takes to execute the trade, as this can mean the difference between making a profit and making a loss. In the real world you have to phone your broker and ask him to sell/buy the stock. The broker then phones the trader, who gives the broker the price. The broker than tells you the price and you either agree to buy/sell or not to. If you agree to buy/sell, the trader then phones the order through to the trader. Online you push your mouse over a cursor and press buy/sell. A much quicker sell!

Volume
Assuming you are happy paying the commission, you can trade as large or small as you want over the Internet. In the real world, most brokers require a minimum buy/sell that is out of the reach of most individual traders.

Finally�
All in all, online stock trading is about �you�. It provides you with the opportunity to trade in stocks without having to pay large commissions while keeping control over your investment decisions.

Capital Flows into the US

The BEA released its estimate of the US current account balance for the third quarter of 2005:

The U.S. current-account deficit--the combined balances on trade in goods and services, income, and net unilateral current transfers--decreased to $195.8 billion (preliminary) in the third quarter of 2005 from $197.8 billion (revised) in the second quarter. The decrease was more than accounted for by a decrease in net outflows for unilateral current transfers, a shift to a surplus on income from a deficit, and an increase in the surplus on services. In contrast, the deficit on goods increased.

More interesting to me than the current account, however, are some of the details contained in the capital account.

The capital account is that portion of the balance of payments table that tracks international purchases and sales of assets, rather than goods and services. Today's figures confirm that foreign central banks have, as far as we can tell, significantly slowed their purchases of dollar assets compared to the pace in 2004. On the other hand, private firms and individuals abroad have been steadily increasing their appetite for US paper assets - stocks, bonds, and bank accounts - as the following chart illustrates.



It's worth mentioning that these two phenomena (greater private capital flows into the US, smaller purchases of dollar assets by foreign central banks) are intimately related. Central banks have been able to reduce their purchases of dollar assets precisely because private agents around the world have been more willing to accumulate dollar assets. And looked at the other way, private agents may be more willing to hold dollar assets because it appears that the pressure on the dollar (as measured by how many of them foreign central banks are being forced to buy) has diminished substantially this year.

For whatever reason, it seems that confidence in the dollar and in US paper assets (note that foreigners have not yet regained their appetite for direct investment in the US, i.e. for directly purchasing US firms or building up their US businesses) has grown in 2005. Fears of an immediate fall in the dollar do not seem widespread among the world's investors.

Financial mathematics

Main article: Financial mathematics

Financial mathematics is the main branch of applied mathematics concerned with the financial markets. Financial mathematics is the study of financial data with the tools of mathematics, mainly statistics. Such data can be movements of securities - stocks and bonds etc. - and their relations. Another large subfield is insurance mathematics.

Experimental finance

Main article: Experimental finance

The goals of experimental finance are to establish different market settings and environments to observe experimentally and analyze agents' behavior and the resulting characteristics of trading flows, information diffusion and aggregation, price setting mechanisms, and returns processes. Researchers in experimental finance can study to what extent existing financial economics theory makes valid predictions, and attempt to discover new principles on which such theory can be extended. Research may proceed by conducting trading simulations or by establishing and studying the behaviour of people in artificial competitive market-like settings.

Finance And Shared Services

There is currently a move towards converging and consolidating Finance provisions into shared services within an organization. Rather than an organization having a number of separate Finance departments performing the same tasks from different locations a more centralized version can be created.

Finance of states

Country, state, county, city or municipality finance is called public finance. It is concerned with

• Identification of required expenditure of a public sector entity
• Source(s) of that entity's revenue
• The budgeting process
• Debt issuance (municipal bonds) for public works projects

Financial economics

Main article: Financial economics

Financial economics is the branch of economics studying the interrelation of financial variables, s.a. prices, interest rates and shares as opposed to those concerning the real economy. Financial economics concentrates on influences of real economic variables on financial ones, in contrast to pure finance.

It studies:

• Valuation - Determination of the fair value of an asset
  • How risky is the asset? (identification of the asset appropriate discount rate)
  • What cash flows will it produce? (discounting of relevant cash flows)
  • How does the market price compare to similar assets? (relative valuation)
  • Are the cash flows dependent on some other asset or event? (derivatives, contingent claim valuation)

• Financial markets and instruments
  • Commodities - topics
  • Stocks - topics
  • Bonds - topics
  • Money market instruments- topics
  • Derivatives - topics

• Financial institutions and regulation

Types Of Finance

Personal finance

Questions in personal finance revolve around

• How much money will be needed by an individual (or by a family) at various points in the future?
• Where will this money come from (e.g. savings or borrowing)?
• How can people protect themselves against unforeseen events in their lives, and risk in financial markets?
• How can family assets be best transferred across generations (bequests and inheritance)?
• How do taxes (tax subsidies or penalties) affect personal financial decisions?

Personal financial decisions may involve paying for education, financing durable goods such as real estate and cars, buying insurance, e.g. health and property insurance, investing and saving for retirement.

Personal financial decisions may also involve paying for a loan.

Business finance ( Corporate )

In the case of a company, managerial finance or corporate finance is the task of providing the funds for the corporations' activities. It generally involves balancing risk and profitability. Long term funds would be provided by ownership equity and long-term credit, often in the form of bonds. These decisions lead to the company's capital structure. Short term funding or working capital is mostly provided by banks extending a line of credit.

On the bond market, borrowers package their debt in the form of bonds. The borrower receives the money it borrows by selling the bond, which includes a promise to repay the value of the bond with interest. The purchaser of a bond can resell the bond, so the actual recipient of interest payments can change over time. Bonds allow lenders to recoup the value of their loan by simply selling the bond.

Another business decision concerning finance is investment, or fund management. An investment is an acquisition of an asset in the hopes that it will maintain or increase its value. In investment management - in choosing a portfolio - one has to decide what, how much and when to invest. In doing so, one needs to

• Identify relevant objectives and constraints: institution or individual - goals - time horizon - risk aversion - tax considerations
• Identify the appropriate strategy: active vs passive - hedging strategy
• Measure the portfolio performance

Financial management is duplicate with the financial function of the Accounting profession. However, Financial Accounting is more concerned with the reporting of historical financial information, while the financial decision is directed toward the future of the firm.