February 28, 2015
The Swiss are to rules what Anastasia Steele is to Christian Grey in Fifty Shades; obedient and slavish. One national obsession in the business world is the proper written reference, the “Zeugnis”. Hours of costly time go into feeding this local fetish. Time to put it and the HR departments who perpetuate it to the […]
February 1, 2015
Banks are under pressure from all sides. From regulators to shareholders. Margin are down and costs are up. The banks need to do something, but what? This week, a few thoughts on where improvement might be possible. Industrialisation! This was the rallying cry at the largest Swiss bank, UBS, several years ago. In an attempt […]
January 19, 2015
Change in the banking business is a tricky art; finding a viable slot for your project on the schedule is seldom an easy task. This week I am hoping some readers will share some views on a challenge. Please read on and reply. There are a lot of fixed dates on the banking calendar: SWIFT […]
January 11, 2015
A sweet topic to start 2015. This post might be titled: “How to win friends and influence people”. It does not matter which industry you are in and how you work, you will always be working with others. This week’s post is about how you nurture those relationships and inspired by recent evidence of how […]
December 14, 2014
This week’s post is inspired by a comment on inter-company trades; last week’s topics. Inside banks, in all the automated processing, it is the humble “account” that owns the transactions that are booked. The history of banks is filled with sudden discoveries of accounts that were not reconciled and had loss making positions or were […]
December 10, 2014
There are three great career wreckers in the Financial Services industry: interest claims, inter-company trades and FX hedging. Inter-company trades, trades between two different legal entities within a group, are the topic for this week’s thoughts. I picked the term “career wreckers” with good reason. There are no happy endings in inter-company trade stories. Well […]
December 1, 2014
What the banks need to learn from Uber. Irony, frustration and a suggestion are the ingredients for this week’s post. Uber, the upstart disrupter of taxi and limousine services, is the inspiration. Irony, because I recently read how a Goldman Sachs executive had moved over to Uber and worked out a whole new way to […]
November 17, 2014
Banks do not always get it right, in fact “hardly ever” may seem more apt. This week’s post tells the story of how the cost of liquidity when properly allocated and charged can dwarf the existing ticket charges we are all familiar with in transaction banking. Banks have to keep liquidity buffers. They are always […]
November 3, 2014
Left to their own devices, banks will not create an orderly world. There is plenty of evidence of cutting corners, misleading and even criminal behaviour in recent times. In the past couple of posts, we have focussed on the Catch-22 of having to cooperate and how the banks need to do this with the right […]
October 25, 2014
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 […]