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This week’s post is inspired by a comment on inter-company trades; last week’s topics. Inside banks, in all the automated processing, it is the humble “account” that owns the transactions that are booked. The history of banks is filled with sudden discoveries of accounts that were not reconciled and had loss making positions or were […]

There are three great career wreckers in the Financial Services industry: interest claims, inter-company trades and FX hedging. Inter-company trades, trades between two different legal entities within a group, are the topic for this week’s thoughts. I picked the term “career wreckers” with good reason. There are no happy endings in inter-company trade stories. Well […]

What the banks need to learn from Uber. Irony, frustration and a suggestion are the ingredients for this week’s post. Uber, the upstart disrupter of taxi and limousine services, is the inspiration. Irony, because I recently read how a Goldman Sachs executive had moved over to Uber and worked out a whole new way to […]

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 […]

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 […]