Our Articles

Infrastructure: a $100B plus per year expense

Inspiration for this week’s post comes from a couple of articles in the press this week. One highlights just how expensive it is to organise what happens after one person says buy and the other says sell. The other highlights a great initiative to encourage the use of standards. The TabbFORUM published a very thought […]

Read More

How competing banks need to cooperate properly

How to behave in the club? Last week’s post was about the unique requirement that the banks have to cooperate in order to effectively settle transactions. A Catch-22, because they need to cooperate and ideally not to have a “Heinz 57 varieties” situation with multiple solutions for the same problem, but as the regulators expect […]

Read More

Catch-22 for the banks. Cursed to cooperate.  

Banking is not special, it is an industry like any other. Whilst I would stand by the first statement, there is something unique about banking. The need to cooperate. Today, in southern Germany, the senior execs of Porsche, Mercedes and BMW might be interested in what their rivals are up to, but they do not […]

Read More

Anglos vs. Swiss, a perennial culture clash?

In any competition between an Anglo and a Swiss, the Anglo will win more often than not. Ok, this is a generalisation. But it holds true often enough in banking, though not at football, as the team there just followed on from earlier defeats of Man Utd. and Chelsea by beating Liverpool. Inspiration for this […]

Read More