SWOT Analysis of PayPal

PayPal is an e-commerce business that allows payments and money transfer to be made through the Internet. PayPal serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as cheque and money orders. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. PayPal is an example of a payment intermediary service that facilitates worldwide e-commerce. PayPal is an eBay subsidiary company and is made up of three leading online payment services: the PayPal global payment service, the Payflow Gateway and Bill Me Later. The company’s open payment platform, PayPal X, that allows developers to build innovative payment applications on multiple platforms and devices. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It charges transaction fee for receiving money. The fees charged Continue reading

Some terms and concepts related to foreign exchange market

1 & 2. Exposure and Risk: Exposure is a measure of the sensitivity of the value of a financial item (asset, liability or cash flow) to changes in the relevant risk factor while risk is a measure of variability of the value of the item attributable to the risk factor. Let us understand this distinction clearly. April 1993 to about July 1995 the exchange rate between rupee and US dollar was almost rock steady. Consider a firm whose business involved both exports to and imports from the US. During this period the firm would have readily agreed that its operating cash flows were very sensitive to the rupee-dollar exchange rate, i.e.; it had significant exposure to this exchange rate; at the same time it would have said that it didn’t perceive significant risk on this account because given the stability of the rupee-dollar fluctuations would have been perceived to be Continue reading

History and Background of Oracle

Larry Ellison, Bob Miller, and Ed Oats founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in 1977. SDL was founded to implement a commercial version of Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). Inspiration to implement RDBMS system came from the 1970 paper on RDBMS authored by Edgor Codd named “A Relational Data for Large Shared Data Banks”. In 1977 SDL implemented first commercial version of RDBMS for CIA. The code name for the project was Oracle. The unique product that the company offered was increasingly recognized in the market and company changed its name to Oracle Systems Corporation to identify itself with its flagship product Oracle. Oracle decided that it would use SQL to retrieve data from database because founders understood that IBM’s SQL will become a de-facto standard. This was one of the early strategic decisions. So Oracle made sure that commercial RDBMS that was developed was compatible with SQL. This gave Oracle Continue reading

Incremental Cash Flow Analysis

The most important and also the most difficult part of an investment analysis is to calculate the  cash flow associated with the project; the cost of funding the project; the cash inflow during  the life of the project; and the terminal, or ending value of the project. Shareholders are  interested in how many additional rupees they will receive in future for the rupees they lay out  today. Hence, what matters is not the project’s total cash flow per period, but the incremental  cash flow for a variety of reasons. They include; Cannibalization: When a new product is introduced it may take away the sales of existing  products. Cannibalization also occurs when a firm builds a plant overseas and winds up  substituting foreign production for parent company exports. In this case company may lose  exports because it is supplying from its overseas production center. To the extent that sales of a Continue reading

What is Customer Analytics?

Data in any form is considered as the new gold in the 21st century.  Organizations that primarily focus on data-driven approaches have the potential to be ahead of their respective game. One of the important and core objectives of any company would be to maintain a solid and strong relationship with its customers, understanding them and providing them what they want. Customer Analytics is this field of analytics, where one dives deep into the consumer data and brings about useful insights on their clients. Customer Analytics finds its utmost use in the marketing as well sales departments where the customer data is the key to understand the customer behavior for them chart their marketing as well advertising strategy. Customer Analytics supports business decision-making through targeting specific groups based on income groups, age groups, and customer segmentation as understanding customer groups would help the businesses to create more strong strategies for Continue reading

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) – Meaning and Importance

In a global marketplace, information has emerged as an agent and enabler of new competitiveness for today’s enterprise. However the paradigm of strategic planning changes sufficiently to support the new role of information and technology. The question is, are changes can support the new role of information and technology and what is the relationship between strategic information system planning with the development database in an organization. Therefore, the development of strategic information system planning is importance in an organization. Strategic information systems planning (SISP) is the process of creating a portfolio based on the use of information system in order to achieve organizational goals and objectives. Within SISP, organizational can clearly define their organizational goals, the critical success factor (CSF) and the problem areas within the organization activity. Introduction to Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) There are two concepts of strategic information systems planning (SISP). The first one is SISP Continue reading