Planet Business

News from the world of business

THE QUESTION:Is the Visa-only payment system for the London 2012 Olympics fair?

Anyone with an interest in catching those tearful moments of Olympic podium glory first-hand has until April 26th to apply for tickets via London2012. com. There’s something of a catch, though – the only way to pay online is by Visa card. This, says Olympic organisers Locog, reflects Visa’s investment as a sponsor. Visa was quite keen to make the process sound delightfully easy, noting that people don’t have to apply for a Visa debit or credit card to buy some of the 6.6 million available tickets, but can simply purchase a Visa prepaid card. It had something of a public relations setback, however, when people whose cards were due to expire over the next few months had their applications rejected by the website.

That glitch is fixed, but the question of whether Visa’s monopoly of the payment system is anti-competitive remains. Last year the UK’s Office of Fair Trading said it and the European Commission were “currently in discussion about what action, if any, should be taken”, but this has gone nowhere. Event chairman Sebastian Coe was clear about the relationship between Visa and Locog. Without sponsors the games wouldn’t be happening at all, he said.

Status update

Publishing profits:Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury says it will make a quarter of its revenue from e-books in 2011, following a 600 per cent rise in higher-margin digital sales.

Disaster cover:After Australian floods and earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, 2011 targets at reinsurance companies "are now in effect meaningless", say Citi analysts.

Town planning:Tourism Ireland has launched the Ireland Town game, which invites Facebookers to "create their own idyllic town in Ireland", like a kind of Celtic Farmville.

Office politics

Here’s a lovely list for multinational company directors to get themselves on – the US National Association for Female Executives (Nafe) ranking of the top 50 companies for executive women.

Published this week, the list is headed by the likes of American Express, Kraft, IBM, Procter Gamble and Prudential. Most of the listed companies have three or more women on their boards.

That compares to fewer than one-quarter of Fortune 500 companies.

It’s not just all about who’s at the top, mind.

Companies making the cut were also hailed for such measures as identifying high-potential women early, offering leadership training to female employees, sponsoring mentoring programmes that specifically target women and having programmes to identify and resolve wage gap grievances.

14.7

The percentage unemployment rate in Ireland in the final three months of 2010, according to new worse-than-expected figures from the CSO.

The food is terrible and the women are not very attractive.

Bernardo Hees, Burger King chief executive, recalls fondly the time he spent studying for an MBA in Britain.