December 15, 2013
The BCBS guidelines are titled “Monitoring Tools for intraday liquidity management”. The title is disingenuous; from the perspective of the banks they are not tools, they are KPI’s or KPI’s. Key Risk or Performance Indicators. And, they are a measure of credit taken and credit given. The more you either take or give, the more likely […]
December 8, 2013
Liquidity in banks is like water in a big city; people assume that when they turn on the tap it is there. The banking world is now a year away from a major change in how it has to measure its intraday liquidity usage. How it responds matters, to the tune of millions in […]
November 25, 2013
Inspiration for this week’s post comes from the Far East, where the local operation of a Swiss bank was recently revealed to have been the victim of a $13mm dollar payment fraud. Now fraud will happen, yet what makes this worth a second look is that it happened in such an obvious risk area, that […]
November 7, 2013
People are our most important asset. A well used saying in many corporate values statement. I think there is a special, vital ingredient on the infrastructure side of the house which deserves mention. Institutional memory. In a recent article on the Warren Buffet / 3G takeover of Heinz, there was a cutting comment about the […]
October 28, 2013
Infrastructure. The Cinderella Function and the forgotten asset; not just in banks. Inspiration for this week’s post comes from three sources that are poles apart, both in time and style. For all the differences, the stories help make a point that is near and dear to me; the value of robust infrastructure and the need […]