March 22, 2016
“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; […]
March 13, 2016
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 […]
March 7, 2016
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 […]
February 16, 2016
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 […]
February 8, 2016
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 […]
February 1, 2016
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: […]