Examining the alleged barriers to acceptance of credit cards Essay

Examining the alleged barriers to acceptance of credit cards - Essay Example However, in order to understand whether this is accurate, one must examine the characteristics of the cash-carry banking culture and also investigate how consumers determine risk in this area. It is somewhat of a bold statement to contribute the aforementioned factors as being legitimate barriers to credit card acceptance. Why is this? Schmith (2008) provides statistics of the explosive growth in credit card penetration across the world. In some countries, credit card usage has outpaced total national growth (i.e. GDP) and the trend in consumer credit card usage continues to escalate significantly (Schmith 2008). There is more evidence, rather, that disruptive innovations in the market place, such as mobile payment systems, are providing a new incentive for consumers to reject credit cards in favour of more modern technologies associated with payment and banking. A disruptive innovation is one defined as a product or service capable of supplanting or transforming an established marke t (Christensen and Raynor 2003). Hence, evolutions in payment systems, such as electronic banking or mobile banking, are transforming available options, making switching costs very low for consumers to select alternatives to credit cards. Do, then, risk perception and cultural characteristics of the cash-carry banking culture actually serve as barriers to credit card adoption? Research indicates that there are far too many explanatory factors for why consumers might reject acceptance of credit cards that are aligned with specific market beliefs and market needs. These factors include the appropriate design of advertising communications by a marketing business, competition...This is aligned properly with many consumer behavioural models that illustrate the processes of selection, organisation and interpretation that involves much psycho-social influence both inherent and stemming from the external environment. Thus, particular segments that do see risk associated with involvement in credit cards, either social, economic, or perhaps privacy related would have different motives from other markets that find trust and reliability in the rather mature credit card industry. The cash and carry consumer, one that values traditionalism in the financial services industry, might be adaptable to accepting credit cards if their evaluative criteria finds an appropriate match with the messages and other related stimuli provided by marketing entities. At least theory would seem to dictate this, but again without knowing exacting market characteristics, a well-justified hypothesis would be difficult to produce. However, there is ample evidence that credit card usage continues to explode and research did not uncover any legitimised data that cash and carry cultures and risk establish barriers to credit card adoption.

Programming Paradigms Comparison Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Programming Paradigms Comparison - Essay Example C++ supports multiple inheritance of method implementations from more than one superclass at a time. While it seems like a very useful feature, adding it to the language turns out to introduce many complexities. (2006a) The program compiled by a c++ compiler, is platform dependent. This means, a source file in C++ when compiled is converted into obj file, which contains machine codes and function calls for the built-in library functions. After this, the obj file is processed by the c++ linker utility, which patches the code of the library functions in order to resolve the library function calls and convert the obj file into exe file. More specifically this code patching is only for unregistered library functions, which are local to the C++ development environment. But when an external registered dll file is used in the source code, then the function calls in the obj file would not be resolved in the exe file and those function calls would be dynamically resolved at runtime of the executable file. C++ supports templates that allow you, for example, to implement a Stack and then instantiate it as Stack or Stack to produce two separate types: a stack of integers and a stack of floating point values. (2006a) C++ allows you to define operators that perform arbitrary operations on instances of your class. In effect, it allows extending the syntax of the language. This is a nifty feature, called operator overloading, tat makes for very elegant examples. (2006a) C++ has the ability to include preprocessor directive in the beginning of a program. (import file name from the library). Java possess the following characteristics: Java does not have any concept of pointers. The Java Runtime Environment by default reference the objects for the programmer. Java does not allow programmer to manipulate pointers or memory addresses of any kind and imposes certain restrictions in this respect (2006a): It does not allow casting object or arraying references into integers or vice versa. It does not allow you to do pointer arithmetic. It does not allow you to compute the size in bytes of any primitive type or object. Some of the reasons are: Pointers are a source of bugs. Eliminating them simplifies the language and eliminates many potential bugs (2006a). Pointers and pointer arithmetic could be used to sidestep Java's run-time checks and security mechanisms. Removing pointers allows Java to provide the security guarantees that it does (2006a). No Global Variables: In Java, every field and method is declared within a class and forms part of that class. The fields and methods of a