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Intraday Liquidity Management: the billion dollar challenge – Part III

“It’s all ‘bout the Ba(lance)S(he)e(t), ’bout the Ba(lance)S(he)e(t)”. The Balance Sheet. A great friend and old colleague, Nick Nicholls,  helped make this very clear in his appeal to focus on the Balance Sheet in his most recent post. With all the changes in regulations and regulatory focus, I would add an extra dimension to this; […]

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Intraday Liquidity Management: the billion dollar challenge – Part II

Home and away. Internal and external. With the European club football competitions reaching their final stages, a simple analogy may help to explain what a strategy for addressing the liquidity management challenge might look like. In the Champions League and Europa Cup, teams play twice, once at home and once away. Mastering liquidity has some […]

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Intraday Liquidity Management: the billion dollar challenge

This week’s post is about intraday liquidity and its costs. At somewhere between 100 and 150 bps,  $1 billion in liquidity equates to costs of $10 million. At that price, this is a topic worth mastering. This is about right here, right now, so the only Blockchain angle is in possible solutions. The next post […]

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How to better control costs from your Network of banks, custodians and vendors.

The “Aha moment”. That moment of total clarity and understanding. I am an Ops centric guy, so I think about controls over Nostro banks and custodians. A recent encounter, made me realise that banks have the same problems controlling IT vendors who are providing outsourced services. This week’s thoughts build on a previous post about […]

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5 things learned about FinTech and Blockchain last week

Hype. There is plenty of it around Blockchain. Nothing I do, or say, will make it go away, but perhaps I can help drive a realistic perspective on. These five lessons are the result of some conversations in London last week and some research. I hope they help others’ understanding of the shifting sands. If […]

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3 thoughts on checking what you pay your bank or custodian for

The prompt for this week’s post is a story about fees charged by State Street, the major custodian: “State Street overbilled customers $200m over 18 years”. Institutions pay many fees to their banks and their custodians. Fees are not an easy thing to reconcile. There is nothing as simple as a SWIFT MT950 cash reconciliation: […]

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3 ways FinTech might help small and medium sized business

This week’s post is inspired by an article in the Times: “Too posh to pay: now suppliers attack Waitrose”. Old story, new song. This is about payments and when bills get paid. The villain is Waitrose, which is a grocery chain and part of the well known John Lewis Group. They are taking 3x longer to […]

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3 Blockchain Thoughts for 2016

The year is off and running. Blockchain and the potential for massive back-office savings is at the front of both mind and mouth. I offer the thoughts here with no desire “to be right”. Rather, I am suggesting that these are the areas  in the FS industry which need  focus and understanding. Without this, progress […]

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Trailer Fees & Retrocessions; Kickbacks by any other name

Two news items from opposite sides of the Atlantic have inspired this first post of 2016. The kickback is nothing new, nor is it something confined to banks. The latest cases show just how banks try to gain the upper hand in the game of cat & mouse both with regulations and clients. The dictionary […]

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SSI Cup – FinTech 1- 0 Traditional Fin Services

FinTech will upend banks! Nothing new in that prophecy. There is no such thing as the SSI, Standing Settlement Instruction, Cup, but if there were the FinTech community would win. In last week’s post, I offered some views on how hard our industry makes it to deal with SSI’s. Every institution manages them, matching them […]

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