Saturday, December 07, 2013

BANKING TERMS


RBI – The Reserve Bank of India is the apex bank of the country, which was constituted under the RBI Act, 1934 to regulate the other banks, issue of bank notes and maintenance of reserves with a view to securing the monetary stability in India.

Demand Deposit – A Demand deposit is the one which can be withdrawn at any time, without any notice or penalty; e.g. money deposited in a checking account or savings account in a bank.

Time Deposit – Time deposit is a money deposit at a banking institution that cannot be withdrawn for a certain "term" or period of time. When the term is over it can be withdrawn or it can be held for another term.

Fixed Deposits – FDs are the deposits that are repayable on fixed maturity date along with the principal and agreed interest rate for the period. Banks pay higher interest rates on FDs than the savings bank account.

Recurring Deposits – These are also called cumulative deposits and in recurring deposit accounts, a certain amounts of savings are required to be compulsorily deposited at specific intervals for a specified period.

Savings Account – Savings account is an account generally maintained by retail customers that deposit money (i.e. their savings) and can withdraw them whenever they need. Funds in these accounts are subjected to low rates of interest.

Current Accounts – These accounts are maintained by the corporate clients that may be operated any number of times in a day. There is a maintenance charge for the current accounts for which the holders enjoy facilities of easy handling, overdraft facility etc.

FCNR Accounts – Foreign Currency Non-Resident accounts are the ones that are maintained by the NRIs in foreign currencies like USD, DM, and GBP etc. The account is a term deposit with interest rates linked to the international rates of interest of the respective currencies.

NRE Accounts – Non-Resident External accounts are the ones in which NRIs remit money in any permitted foreign currency and the remittance is converted to Indian rupees for credit to NRE accounts. The accounts can be in the form of current, saving, FDs, recurring deposits. The interest rates and other terms of these accounts are as per the RBI directives.

Cheque Book - A small, bound booklet of cheques. A cheque is a piece of paper produced by your bank with your account number, sort-code and cheque number printed on it. The account number distinguishes your account from other accounts; the sort-code is your bank's special code which distinguishes it from any other bank.

Cheque Clearing - This is the process of getting the money from the cheque-writer's account into the cheque receiver's account.

Clearing Bank - This is a bank that can clear funds between banks. For general purposes, this is any institution which we know of as a bank or as a provider of banking services.

Bounced Cheque - when the bank has not enough funds in the relevant account or the account
holder requests that the cheque is bounced (under exceptional circumstances) then the bank will return the cheque to the account holder.

Credit Rating - This is the rating which an individual (or company) gets from the credit industry. This is obtained by the individual's credit history, the details of which are available from specialist organisations like CRISIL in India.

Credit-Worthiness - This is the judgement of an organization which is assessing whether or not to take a particular individual on as a customer. An individual might be considered credit-worthy by one organisation but not by another. Much depends on whether an organization is involved with high risk customers or not.

Interest - The amount paid or charged on money over time. If you borrow money interest will be charged on the loan. If you invest money, interest will be paid (where appropriate to the investment).

Overdraft - This is when a person has a minus figure in their account. It can be authorized (agreed to in advance or retrospect) or unauthorized (where the bank has not agreed to the overdraft either because the account holder represents too great a risk to lend to in this way or because the account holder has not asked for an overdraft facility).

Payee - The person who receives a payment. This often applies to cheques. If you receive a cheque you are the payee and the person or company who wrote the cheque is the payer.

Payer - The person who makes a payment. This often applies to cheques. If you write a cheque you are the payer and the recipient of the cheque is the payee.

Security for Loans - Where large loans are required the lending institution often needs to have a guarantee that the loan will be paid back. This takes the form of a large item of capital outlay (typically a house) which is owned or partly owned and the amount owned is at least equivalent to the loan required.

Internet Banking - Online banking (or Internet banking) allows customers to conduct financial transactions on a secure website operated by the bank.

Credit Card - A credit card is one of the systems of payments named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. It is a card entitling its holder to buy goods and services based on the holder's promise to pay for these goods and services.

Debit Card – Debit card allows for direct withdrawal of funds from customers bank accounts. The spending limit is determined by the available balance in the account.

Loan - A loan is a type of debt.  In a loan, the borrower initially receives or borrows an amount of money, called the principal, from the lender, and is obligated to pay back or repay an equal amount of money to the lender at a later time. There are different kinds of loan such as the house loan, auto loan etc.

Bank Rate - This is the rate at which central bank (RBI) lends money to other banks or financial institutions.   If the bank rate goes up, long-term interest rates also tend to move up, and vice-versa.

CRR - Cash reserve Ratio (CRR) is the amount of funds that the banks have to keep with RBI. If RBI decides to increase the percent of this, the available amount with the banks comes down. RBI is using this method (increase of CRR rate), to drain out the excessive money from the banks.

SLR - SLR stands for Statutory Liquidity Ratio. This term is used by bankers and indicates the minimum percentage of deposits that the bank has to maintain in form of gold, cash or other approved securities.  Thus, we can say that it is ratio of cash and some other approved to liabilities (deposits). It regulates the credit growth in India.

ATM - An automated teller machine (ATM) is a computerised telecommunications device that provides the clients with access to financial transactions in a public space without the need for a cashier, human clerk or bank teller. On most modern ATMs, the customer is identified by inserting a plastic ATM card with a magnetic stripe or a plastic smart card with a chip, that contains a unique card number and some security information such as an expiration date or CVV. Authentication is provided by the customer entering a personal identification number (PIN)

REPO RATE: - Under repo transaction the borrower places with the lender certain acceptable securities against funds received and agree to reverse this transaction on a predetermined future date at agreed interest cost. Repo rate is also called (repurchase agreement or repurchase option).

REVERSE REPO RATE:  is the interest rate earned by the bank for lending money tothe RBI in exchange of govt. securities or "lender buys securities with agreement to sell them back at a predetermined rate".

CASH RESERVE RATIO:  specifies the percentage of their total deposits the commercial bank must keep with central bank or RBI. Higher the CRR lower will be the capacity of bank to create credit.

SLR:  known as Statutorily Liquidity Ratio. Each bank is required statutorily maintain a prescribed minimum proportion of its demand and time liabilities in the form of designated liquid asset.
OR
"Every bank has to maintain a percentage of its demand and time liabilities by way of cash, gold etc".

BANK RATE:  is the rate of interest which is charged by RBI on its advances to commercial banks. When reserve bank desires to restrict expansion of credit it raises the bank rate there by making the credit costlier to commercial bank.

OVERDRAFT: It is the loan facility on customer current account at a bank permitting him to overdraw up to a certain agreed limit for a agreed period ,interest is payable only on the amount of loan taken up.

PRIME LENDING RATE: It is the rate at which commercial banks give loan to its prime customers.

Will 2-D Tin Be the Next Super Material?


                             A single layer of tin atoms could be the world's first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate, according to a team of theoretical physicists led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

Researchers call the new material "stanene," combining the Latin name for tin (stannum) with the suffix used in graphene, another single-layer material whose novel electrical properties hold promise for a wide range of applications.

"Stanene could increase the speed and lower the power needs of future generations of computer chips, if our prediction is confirmed by experiments that are underway in several laboratories around the world," said the team leader, Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), a joint institute with SLAC. The team’s work was published recently in Physical Review Letters.


Photo - tin can and piece of scrap tin sitting on a periodic table of elements with tin "Sn" highlighted
A single layer of tin – an element familiar as the coating for tin cans – could be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate. If used as wiring in computer chips, the material, called "stanene," could increase the speed and lower the power needs of future generations of computers. (Brad Plummer/SLAC)


 Image - grid of atoms, see caption
Adding fluorine atoms (yellow) to a single layer of tin atoms (grey) should allow a predicted new material, stanene, to conduct electricity perfectly along its edges (blue and red arrows) at temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius (212 Fahrenheit). (Yong Xu/Tsinghua University; Greg Stewart/SLAC)


The Path to Stanene

For the past decade, Zhang and colleagues have been calculating and predicting the electronic properties of a special class of materials known as topological insulators, which conduct electricity only on their outside edges or surfaces and not through their interiors. When topological insulators are just one atom thick, their edges conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency. These unusual properties result from complex interactions between the electrons and nuclei of heavy atoms in the materials.

“The magic of topological insulators is that by their very nature, they force electrons to move in defined lanes without any speed limit, like the German autobahn,” Zhang said. “As long as they’re on the freeway – the edges or surfaces – the electrons will travel without resistance.”

In 2006 and 2009, Zhang’s group predicted that mercury telluride and several combinations of bismuth, antimony, selenium and tellurium should be topological insulators, and they were soon proven right in experiments performed by others. But none of those materials is a perfect conductor of electricity at room temperature, limiting their potential for commercial applications.

Earlier this year, visiting scientist Yong Xu, who is now at Tsinghua University in Beijing, collaborated with Zhang’s group to consider the properties of a single layer of pure tin.

“We knew we should be looking at elements in the lower-right portion of the periodic table,” Xu said. “All previous topological insulators have involved the heavy and electron-rich elements located there.”
Their calculations indicated that a single layer of tin would be a topological insulator at and above room temperature, and that adding fluorine atoms to the tin would extend its operating range to at least 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).

Ultimately a Substitute for Silicon?

Zhang said the first application for this stanene-fluorine combination could be in wiring that connects the many sections of a microprocessor, allowing electrons to flow as freely as cars on a highway. Traffic congestion would still occur at on- and off-ramps made of conventional conductors, he said. But stanene wiring should significantly reduce the power consumption and heat production of microprocessors.
Manufacturing challenges include ensuring that only a single layer of tin is deposited and keeping that single layer intact during high-temperature chip-making processes.

“Eventually, we can imagine stanene being used for many more circuit structures, including replacing silicon in the hearts of transistors,” Zhang said. “Someday we might even call this area Tin Valley rather than Silicon Valley.”

Additional contributors included researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. The research was supported by the Mesodynamic Architectures program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.