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 […]
August 25, 2014
This post is inspired by two events. Firstly, an article in the Financial Times on how a US regulator is putting pressure on banks on matters of ethics. Secondly, I was recently asked to address a graduating class from a new academy in India. The FT article was from July 27th: “New York Federal Reserve […]
August 17, 2014
Insight form the coal face; in 2011 UBS had a $2.3B loss created by rogue trader Kweku Adoboli. Beyond the wrong doing and even conspiracy on the trading desk, operational processes failed. I have commented on this case before (see: The 3 Lessons from the UBS case). Recently, somebody more closely involved with those events shared […]