By Will Sturgeon, 9 November 2000 10:00
NEWS Obviously such news will be greeted nowhere so keenly as in the technology sector where stock options are synonymous with the higher end of the wage scale and for so long have appeared a mixed blessing at best. For employees who took on jobs with the promise of stock options as opposed to a traditional wage accounting for the entirety of remuneration the relief will come as a welcome piece of good news... The NI breaks on share options are just one of a host of measures in a largely benevolent Budget, raising the question: Where is the money coming from? Well, for starters we should perhaps look no further than the UK high bandwidth fixed wireless licence auction due to start tomorrow. The Independent reports that 10 companies are planning to bid in the auction for the 11 licences for regions across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The services when rolled out will target home and business internet users looking for fast, always-on internet access. And returning to the issue of money, analysts are expecting the auction to raise "several hundred million pounds" - a figure well short of the £23bn raised in the UMTS licence auction earlier this year but as the Independent concludes, it is a "tidy sum" nonetheless. Indeed... Finally, all this talk of money takes us onto credit cards, with news in the Financial Times that Visa is to move all its payment processing onto a web-based system provided by BEA systems capable of handling $1,000bn of transactions or 10,000 transactions a second. Visa reports that 16 of its banking clients have already moved over onto the new system and expects most of its customers to make the move by January 2002...
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