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 […]
October 21, 2014
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 […]
October 12, 2014
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 […]
October 6, 2014
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 […]
September 29, 2014
Inspiration for this week’s post comes from a recent presentation for the Swiss Finance Institute. I have always maintained that there is nothing special about banking, so included in that presentation were thoughts on what might be learned from the great watch company. Success with production in one of the world’s most expensive locations In […]
September 15, 2014
This week’s post is inspired by some client work and offers a few suggestions for the kinds of control needed to ensure that client data is both accurate and complete. In times passed, setting up a client account was more art than science. There might have been twenty fields to fill in. If you filled […]
September 8, 2014
“CFTC fines Merrill Lynch $1.2 mln for client fee errors”. This was the headline from an Aug 24th Reuters article. Reading it was a surprise and it wasn’t; after all, fines for banks are almost an everyday occurrence. What was a surprise was the nature of the fine and the detail of the case. The […]
August 31, 2014
Religion is a dangerous furrow to plough, with every risk of upsetting any and everybody. This week’s post is about religious fervour; a doctrine and how it is followed. It is not about the rights and wrongs of one versus another. In the book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, the […]