April 2, 2013
The financial services business is one with many complexities; from product mix to its geographical spread and very importantly the daily interaction that the many players in the market have. It is though, a business like any other and one that requires its operations to function properly every day. This Blog has reported on a […]
March 25, 2013
In the 25 years I have been in banking, one of the major changes is the number of mandatory changes that have to be managed at once and their impact. In the first quarter of 2013, I was discussing this challenge with a potential client, a medium sized Swiss private bank. By their reckoning, their […]
March 20, 2013
A recent New York Times article on an on-going saga at the Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) caught my eye. Of course former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has set the bar very high for unethical and generally repugnant behaviour and the general weaknesses of banks in the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and […]
March 14, 2013
Last week’s post focussed on the horror stories of what goes wrong when spreadsheets get out of control. This week’s post is about the other side of that coin; the good news that there are tools available to help you control the spreadsheet jungle. A recent article in Forbes covered this topic. (See: Forbes, Feb […]
March 5, 2013
To misquote a phrase once used about advertising: “Spreadsheets are not necessarily a good or bad thing, it depends on the use to which they are put.” They are certainly a prominent feature of everyday life in banking. They do though need to be used carefully. This week’s post has a sample of the typical […]
February 25, 2013
Uncluttered: When there are exceptions, make it nigh on impossible to overlook them. The picture below illustrates my own personal view of how to do this. If you are showing what needs attention, suppress, shade out or put elsewhere all the information about things that do not need attention. The picture on the left is […]