Attention at all passengers. You can now book your train tickets on Uber and get 10% back in Uber credits to spend on your next train journey.

So no excuses not to visit your in-laws this Christmas.

Trains now on Uber. T's and C's apply check the Uber app. Hello I'm Simon Long, finance and economics editor at The Economist, and this is Money Talks.

Later in the programme, the once all-pervasive and dominant tech giant Microsoft has been busy reinventing itself.

If I work for Microsoft now, I have a new application, it doesn't have to run first on Windows, which was the case before.

And fed up with your bank?

European regulators may be about to help.

Under the changes, banks will be obliged, provided the customer consents,

to share transaction information with FinTech companies.

But to start, this week after this podcast has recorded, Dutch voters go to the polls. The elections draw an unusual international

attention because of the prominence of Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim populist.

But one interesting quirk of the Netherlands electoral system is that a few weeks

before the elections a nonpartisan government economic analysis unit produces an assessment

of each party's tax and spending platforms, estimating their budgetary

and economic impact.

Then of course the parties start hitting each other over the head with results.

The upside is a powerful fact-based consensus on some of the issues at stake.

Matt Steinglass is our Europe editor who's been following the election and he joins me now.

Matt, does Head Builders play this game of submitting his tax and spending plans for analysis?

No, he doesn't. He's one of the few parties that think that they have more to lose by letting

their plans be analysed by a neutral analyst than by staying out of the game altogether.

And is that partly because no one seriously expects him to form a government?

...