Oakmere Wealth Management Advisors Police Officers
Oakmere Wealth Management is proud to offer bespoke wealth advice to retiring police officers. We are experienced in working with retiring police officers predominantly within Cheshire Constabulary, advising them generally about how to restructure their financial situation, and also putting their mind at rest that they are doing everything they can to maximise their income in retirement.
We all have goals, dreams and ambitions for the future, for ourselves and our families, but how do we achieve them?
At Oakmere Wealth Management we aim to help you realise your ambitions - whatever they may be. As professional financial advisers we can help you make informed decisions about your financial future - short, medium and long term.
You will almost certainly have plans of one kind or another - buying a home, living abroad, perhaps retiring, but such ambitions have financial implications and you can't leave it all to chance. Careful planning aims to help turn your plans into reality and the sooner you start your financial planning the greater your chance of realising your goals.
There are so many issues to consider when planning one's financial future, whether you are just starting out in your career or are approaching retirement.
Working with Retiring Police Officers
Retirement presents a major crossroads in life, with important decisions to be made affecting families and long-term finances. This is especially important for officers who don't work again.
For those leaving the Police Service it is inevitably a time of great change and each retiring police officer's situation is unique. At Oakmere Wealth Management we take time to get to know the police officers and their families before we put forward any recommendations. Meetings are complimentary, informal, and are usually conducted in the familiar surroundings of people’s own homes.
You can rest assured that we will provide you with expert financial advice plus regular reviews and evaluations of your financial plan.
Contact Oakmere Wealth Management Ltd today for a no-obligation consultation about planning your financial future.
Security and Risk Online: Get ahead of online fraud this holiday season
Holiday shopping has changed a lot in the last few years with major online shopping events from around the world gaining popularity in Australia. This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were one of the biggest online shopping days in Australia, kicking off the pre-Christmas rush. Cyber Monday broke records in the US hitting US$3.45 billion in online sales, up 12 per cent from last year with Australia and the rest of the world following suit.
But with the increase in online holiday shopping comes a commensurate increase in the instances of fraud. Australian internet businesses suffer dramatically more card fraud than the global average, with online fraud rising by 38% between 2014 — 2015, compared to the global average of 13%.
It’s a lesser-known quirk of the financial industry that, unlike their brick-and-mortar counterparts, online businesses are responsible for not only detecting fraud, but also paying the associated costs. On average, every $1 of fraudulent orders costs an online business an additional $2.69. A couple of weeks ago a foreign syndicate was busted by the Australian Federal Police for the theft of more than 30,000 Australian credit cards, spending more than $30 million. A hefty sum, for sure, but nothing close to the US$32 billion that online retailers spent preventing and remediating hacks in 2015. Online businesses are also susceptible to a wider range of fraud schemes, including credit card fraud, payout scams and faux refunds.
So as the holiday sales kick off, what can online businesses do about it?
The basics: getting started with fraud prevention
To begin, businesses should examine the address verification code (a postcode that matches what’s on file with the cardholder’s bank), require a card verification code (the 3- or 4-digit code on their card), and delay shipping. The latter step is especially helpful for expensive items, as it provides a safety window when the actual cardholder might flag a large fraudulent purchase.
However, these checks aren’t foolproof: Legitimate customers can easily enter a typo in their street address or move and forget to update their billing zip code, resulting in false positives, and fraudsters are often able to buy stolen credit card numbers together with their card verification codes.
The next step is manual reviews: Many business rely on employees to audit transactions and create complex, custom rules (such as, “temporarily block all orders over $500 until reviewed and approved”). All of this sound pretty complicated and manual. The answer? Machine learning.
Let machines do the heavy-lifting
Thanks to recent advances in machine learning and AI, businesses today can analyse millions of online transactions and identify buying patterns across large numbers of retailers, spotting outliers in real-time and flagging odd charges long before a human analyst would spot a problem.
Sift Science offers machine-learning-based fraud detection trained on a business’s data; other tools like Riskified and Signifyd offer chargeback insurance, screening every charge for a fee, blocking suspicious purchase, and compensating their customers when they failed to block fraud.
Stripe’s fraud tool, Radar, constantly learns from the hundreds of thousands of businesses taking payments through Stripe around the world. This new approach enabled Watsi, a global funding platform for medical treatments, to block more than $40 million in attempted fraud over a two-month span, all with limited to no human involvement.
Don’t leave money on the table
Of course, the difficulty with fraud is that pre-emptively blocking too many transactions means foregoing legitimate purchases too. In theory, you could prevent fraud from Southeast Asia by blocking all transactions from Southeast Asia; but that approach means you’d also be foregoing legitimate transactions from one of the world’s most populous regions.
So even once you’ve implemented tools for preventing fraud, it’s important to remember that your ultimate goal isn’t blocking fraud — it’s maximizing revenue. This means you should:
1. Consider multiple metrics: Don’t just focus on one metric like false positive rate (legitimate transactions that you’re blocking) or dispute rate. After all, you can easily make the former zero by not trying to catch any fraud (and the latter zero by not accepting any payments). Your overall fraud protection approach will offer a trade-off between false positives and false negatives, and you should understand what that trade-off is and what is optimal for your business. This break-even calculator can give you an example of the kind of calculations it can be helpful to do.
2. Find your “healthy” dispute rate: Unsurprisingly, fraud varies by sector. For example, the median fraud rate for retail is 0.02 per cent, while for nonprofits it’s 0.1%. Once you know your industry’s rate, compare it to your business’ unique situation and data to identify a “healthy” fraud benchmark. Trying to drive your dispute rate far below what is natural for your sector can be more effort than it’s worth.
3. Always be measuring: No matter what solution you choose, be rigorous in assessing efficacy. For example, if you’re manually customising rules, you can evaluate their performance by backtesting them or by running A/B tests in real-time. Don’t rely on intuition that tells you all payments from a certain region, or at a certain time of day, are fraudulent. Formulate your hypothesis and validate it with data!
On the internet, the only constant is change itself. As consumer behaviour and fraud schemes continue to evolve, businesses that want to maximise their revenue this holiday season — and year round — should be using modern fraud defences that can adapt and help them stay a step ahead of fraudsters.
Online Security: NZers flock online for shopping despite cybercrime fears
New Zealanders plan to do nearly 40 percent of their Christmas shopping online this year despite fears of having their credit card or personal details stolen, according to new research from Norton by Symantec.
The Norton Online Shopping Survey reveals that 20 percent of Kiwis find online shopping stressful because of security worries yet 37 percent still do not check a website’s security before shopping online and only 17 percent of those who bother to check are fully confident they know what to look for.
"New Zealand’s love affair with online shopping has seen one in three Kiwis spend more than two hours per week shopping online," said Mark Gorrie, Director, Norton Business Unit, Pacific region, Symantec.
"However with the number of people affected by online crime continuing to rise[1], scammers are constantly refining their skills and targeting New Zealanders with malicious links and scams containing ‘too good to be true’ deals to steal their credit cards details and personal information.
"While the Norton Online Shopping Survey shows that New Zealanders are concerned about security when they shop online, some Kiwis are still choosing to not act on these concerns and putting themselves at risk of identity theft and credit card fraud," Gorrie added.
Online Shopping Security Concerns
Over two thirds of New Zealanders (68 percent) worry most about having their credit card details stolen, whilst half of respondents (51 percent) admitted they were fearful of purchasing goods from an untrustworthy or illegitimate site.
In addition, New Zealanders were concerned about falling victim to a data breach from an online retailer and having a username and password leaked from an online retailer - both at 35 percent. Surprisingly, 12 percent of those surveyed were not concerned by any of these risks at all.
Many of these security concerns are warranted with approximately 17 percent of New Zealanders experiencing credit card fraud as a result of online shopping. Indeed the proportion might even be as high as 25 percent since eight percent said they have experienced credit card fraud but are not sure whether the fraudsters obtained their card details whilst they were shopping online or not.
Smartphone security also presents security challenges for New Zealanders shopping online. The majority of New Zealanders (80 percent) have used their smartphones to browse online shops and 62 percent have made online purchases using their smartphones. Interestingly one in three Kiwis (32 percent) have entered their credit card details on a mobile app yet more than half of all Kiwis (51 percent) are using unprotected smartphones. Only one third of New Zealanders who shop online use two factor authentication and nearly half (47 percent) do not even know what two factor authentication means.
Norton Online Shopping Safety Tips
- If it is too good to be true, it probably is. Be aware of the cheap price tag as free or discounted goods could end up being really costly. So if you have found the latest hot designer shoes, but for a tenth of the price, regardless of how nice they may be for your office Christmas party, they are probably not real. Cybercriminals are experts at creating websites and making them look identical to your favourite brand sites. Only shop at reputable online sites and avoid getting your credit card scammed.
- Beware of fake website links. Do not click on links in an email that appear to come from your favourite online store. Instead type the store’s address into your browser to avoid going to a malicious website.
Be smart with your passwords. Protect your accounts with strong, unique passwords that use a combination of at least 10 upper and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers to help keep the bad guys at bay. Make it difficult for attackers to access your information by changing your passwords every three months and not reusing passwords for multiple accounts. That way, if a cybercriminal gets your password, they can’t compromise all of your accounts. And if it is too overwhelming to keep up this practice, use a password manager to help.
Beware of phishing scams. Think twice before opening unsolicited messages or attachments, particularly from people you don’t know, or clicking on random links. The message may be from a cybercriminal who has compromised your friend or family member’s email or social media accounts.
Organise your online shopping. Set up an email account specifically to deal with online shopping. Provide as little information as possible to get the account set-up and don’t use it for anything else such as online banking, business correspondence or family matters.
Protect your bank details. Always look out for the ‘padlock’ icon or the Norton Secured Seal when making a payment online. These symbols indicate that the website you are visiting uses encryption to protect you, so cybercriminals cannot capture your personal information. Never let a website ‘remember’ your credit card details, always retype them if you want to shop there again.
Online payments. Even though it is the season of goodwill, avoid using public or shared computers, or even a wireless network to make a payment online. Hackers can easily capture your account information, log-in details and steal your money. Use a separate credit card with a small credit limit for online purchases.
Is your internet security software up-to-date? Update your security software regularly, especially during the festive season. Cybercriminals are more sophisticated than ever before and they will jump on any social trend to spread malware and steal your personal details.
Check your statements. Always check your credit card statements to look out for unexpected transactions.
Tyre&Auto Southbourne Group Review: The perks of getting the services of a trustworthy car servicing company
There are a lot of benefits an individual could get by hiring a dedicated car servicing company since it could meet all your car maintenance and repair needs. From the time you got your own car, you must choose a company that you will trust for a long period of time just like Tyre&Auto Southbourne Group. Following are some of the perks of having the services of a trustworthy and committed car servicing company:
Longer lifespan
To have a healthy and long-lasting machine, it should be a clean machine first. Just like your own body because as long as you're taking good care of it, it will definitely stay healthy. If you want to prevent any unwanted rusts in your car's body or chinks in your engine, then you should perform a regular maintenance on it. Bringing back your vehicle to its “almost” factory-condition requires regular cleaning, especially after going through heavy snow or rain. Some people can do this task alone, while others prefer the help of professionals to ensure the great condition of their cars.
Preserved value
If you're planning to sell your car in the future, it will surely have a high resale value if it is well-maintained. However, a lot of car owners these days don't keep detailed and updated maintenance records because for them, it requires so much time. And this is where the role of a car servicing company becomes crucial because those professionals can do this task well for you. They can also provide regular reminders that will make you perform the required and scheduled tasks properly and on time.
Help prevent major problems
Cars are not perfect vehicles, after all, they may show some faults in the future such as defects caused by the effects of weather and nonstop use. Professionals who have expertise in cars can better determine those faults. Don't wait for minor problems to become major issues, which could lead to huge expenses down the road, be prepared and hire experts beforehand.
Technical expertise
Many ordinary car owners do not have the necessary technical skills and tools to maintain the good shape of their cars, so they settle for the services of a car servicing company such as the Tyre&Auto Southbourne Group instead. Rather than going DIY, they prefer a professional car servicing company to do some tasks such as wheel balancing, electrical repairs, and ignition timing.
Efficient record-keeping
In the hands of a professional car service provider, your car's maintenance and repair log will become valuable.
Companies like Tyre&Auto Southbourne Group can bring savings to an individual or a family because they can shoulder all the responsibilities involved in your car where they will also encourage you to do or focus on more productive tasks instead.
Take good care of your car so that it will maintain its good condition for a long, long time.
SC Advisors To Serve As Owner’s Advisor For Citrus Bowl Renovation
SC Advisors Real Estate Orlando Projects in Singapore Review - SC Advisors has been engaged by the City of Orlando to serve as the Owner’s Advisor for the renovation of the Florida Citrus Bowl Stadium. The most challenging element of the project is timeframe—demolishing and then rebuilding 80% of the structure—must be accomplished with ten months to avoid losing revenue and continuity from holiday bowl games and other marquee events.
“SC Advisors will work closely with our partners, the City of Orlando and Florida Citrus Sports, to transform this historic stadium into one of the finest bowl venues in the country,” said Jay Berlinsky, founder and owner of SC Advisors. “The timeframe calls for extraordinary levels of planning, integration and coordination. We look forward to the challenge.”
Hawkfield Gallery Review: Enhancing and Preserving American Art
How will you respond if someone asks you on what art is? The meaning of art is very broad with many answers. It is one component of culture that lets the artist express his feelings, thoughts and observation. Its concept is subjective, open and debatable.
So how or when will you say that a piece of work is an art? Do you have the knowledge to distinguish good art from bad art? If not, then look for a fine art consultant and a prominent art gallery to help and guide you in buying art. Hawkfield Gallery consultants and its fine art consultants had established a good reputation in the art industry because of their knowledge and capability to recognize talented artists and worthy artworks.
Hawkfield Gallery's massive art collection spans from the 20th to 21st century American visual arts. The gallery's fine art consultants provide quality service to people who are willing to sell or buy impressive artworks. They don't just focus on collectors; they work closely with first-time buyers too. Their wide experiences in buying and selling art have helped first-time buyers to start their own collection and to motivate those who want to enter the art industry.
Check out the website of Hawkfield Gallery or ask for an appointment with them. Their gallery is located in a shore town midway between Boston and Cape Cod, a place where you can see breathtaking landscapes. It is housed in an 1850's farmhouse and became a tearoom, craft shop and lending library in the 1920's. The farmhouse is located in an area beside the historic North River. Tourists can take a stroll along woodland trails which lead to a pier on the river. Moreover, the place has numerous antique shops, galleries of historic sites in the South Shore's Plymouth County.
The team of Hawkfield Gallery aims at enhancing and preserving folk art and American culture contained on artworks. Purchasing an artwork in Hawkfield is like helping to preserve the cultural heritage of America. You will somehow feel that you contributed in maintaining the America's culture and protecting it for future generations.
What’s Behind Google’s Secretive Ad-Blocking Policy? By MIT Technolohy Review
The decision to stop carrying certain types of online ads prompts questions.
When Google decided in May to stop accepting online ads for short-term, ultra-high-cost personal loans known as payday loans, some people wondered whether the company was acting more like a publisher exercising editorial control than a supposedly neutral search engine.
Now that Google’s policy has gone into effect, it’s worth asking: To what extent should the company be a gatekeeper, judging which online ads are okay and which are not? And if the world’s largest Internet search engine is going to be selective about accepting ads, where does it draw the line?
The same questions could be applied to Microsoft and Yahoo, which refuse to carry ads for certain types of sensitive content (but still advertise payday loans). Baidu, the world’s second-largest search engine, has been grappling with these issues since earlier this year, when its practice of promoting medical listings without vetting them sparked outrage over a tragedy: a young man with cancer died after receiving an ineffective treatment from a hospital he found through a Baidu ad. The outcry prompted an investigation by China’s Internet regulator, which ordered Baidu to review its ads and remove any that promote unlicensed medical providers.
University of Maryland law professor Frank Pasquale says Google has tried to have it both ways: sometimes it portrays itself as a simple utility and a mere conduit of its customers’ ads, but other times it presents itself as a content provider that can and should exercise control over the ads it shows.
“Whenever Google is accused of abetting or enabling copyright infringement or defamation, it says, ‘We’re just [connecting people] like the phone company does, and you wouldn’t sue the phone company over this,’” says Pasquale. “But when people say, ‘If you’re a common carrier [utility], you should take all ads,’ Google will say, ‘No, we’re like a newspaper and we should have carte blanche over what we publish.’”
With payday loan ads, Google is characterizing itself as the watchful online guardian. The company has said it banned the ads to protect its users because “research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates.” (Google declined to comment for this story beyond saying that it constantly reviews its AdWords policies and updates them ”when necessary.”)
Google also seems to have been influenced by advocacy from a large coalition of civil rights, digital rights, and financial reform organizations. In late 2015, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and other groups sent Google reports detailing abuses that often accompany payday loans—among them fraud, unauthorized transactions, and long-term indebtedness. “We said, ‘This is a problem, and we want to talk to you about this,’” says Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, who participated in the outreach campaign. “There were long conversations with Google and a lot of bringing this research to their attention over the course of a couple of months.”
An ongoing inquiry into payday lending by the U.S. government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may have further heightened Google’s interest in predatory lending practices.
Consumers might not realize it, but Google—and other ad-supported search engines—have been making editorial decisions about the types of ads they will carry for years. These companies won the right to reject ads they consider objectionable in 2007, when a Delaware district court ruled that constitutional free-speech guarantees don’t apply to search engines since they are for-profit companies and not “state actors.” The decision cited earlier cases that upheld newspapers’ rights to decide which ads to run.
Google currently prohibits ads for “dangerous,” “dishonest,” and “offensive” content, such as recreational drugs, weapons, and tobacco products; fake documents and academic cheating services; and hate-group paraphernalia. Google also restricts ads for content it deems legally or culturally sensitive, such as adult-oriented, gambling-related, and political content; alcoholic beverages; and health care and medicine. It may require additional information from these advertisers and limit placement to certain geographical locations.
Legal experts aren’t uniformly comfortable with Google’s taking on this role. While the University of Maryland’s Pasquale supports Google’s decision to add online payday loans to its restricted list as a benefit to consumers, University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak thinks Google is overreaching. Given the company’s dominance—it is estimated to have a 55 percent share of the $86.2 billion global market for search ads—Kwak thinks Google is essentially exercising regulatory authority when it bans certain ads and should be subject to scrutiny on the grounds that it might be violating First Amendment protections on free speech.
“The question is, ‘When does something have so much control over the dissemination of ideas that it should be treated as part of the government?’” says Kwak. “This is a company with enormous power that’s using that power to affect other industries.”
Now that Google has agreed to ban a category of ads, partly on the basis of community advocacy, will people expect it to block other ads that cause public harm? And since Google has committed to policing its payday loan ads, shouldn’t it take responsibility for other potentially unethical ads that it runs?
Consider for-profit colleges and services for relief of student debt. Google has not instituted special regulations for such ads even though both entities are widely believed to capitalize on consumers’ confusion and hurt more people than they help.
Logan Koepke, an analyst at Upturn, a technology law and policy consultancy that published an influential 2015 report about online payday loans, thinks Google’s decision may set a precedent for consumer advocates to seek to shape companies’ ad policies.
Some people aren’t comfortable with Google as the final arbiter on these topics. Kwak, for one, would like to see greater transparency surrounding such decisions. He suggests that Google hire a group of economists or social scientists to identify deceptive products being advertised online, or perhaps work with the CFPB to determine the most exploitative financial products.
Pasquale also favors some form of public or government scrutiny to ensure that such decisions are being made in the public interest and not for commercial reasons favoring Google. That’s relevant to the payday loan issue since some people have speculated that the ban will benefit LendUp, an online lender that describes itself as a “payday loan alternative” and is funded by Google Ventures, the investment division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
LendUp has pointed out, though, that its ads will be subject to Google’s ad ban, just like those of other lenders.
Bedoya understands why Google’s clout and reach make people uneasy, but he says, “The reality is, these companies had tremendous power before this decision and will have tremendous power after it. The key is to encourage them to use their position in a way that’s not harmful.”
