December 15, 2013
The BCBS guidelines are titled “Monitoring Tools for intraday liquidity management”. The title is disingenuous; from the perspective of the banks they are not tools, they are KPI’s or KPI’s. Key Risk or Performance Indicators. And, they are a measure of credit taken and credit given. The more you either take or give, the more likely […]
December 8, 2013
Liquidity in banks is like water in a big city; people assume that when they turn on the tap it is there. The banking world is now a year away from a major change in how it has to measure its intraday liquidity usage. How it responds matters, to the tune of millions in […]
November 25, 2013
Inspiration for this week’s post comes from the Far East, where the local operation of a Swiss bank was recently revealed to have been the victim of a $13mm dollar payment fraud. Now fraud will happen, yet what makes this worth a second look is that it happened in such an obvious risk area, that […]
November 7, 2013
People are our most important asset. A well used saying in many corporate values statement. I think there is a special, vital ingredient on the infrastructure side of the house which deserves mention. Institutional memory. In a recent article on the Warren Buffet / 3G takeover of Heinz, there was a cutting comment about the […]
October 28, 2013
Infrastructure. The Cinderella Function and the forgotten asset; not just in banks. Inspiration for this week’s post comes from three sources that are poles apart, both in time and style. For all the differences, the stories help make a point that is near and dear to me; the value of robust infrastructure and the need […]
October 16, 2013
First impressions count. That is not news and in fact is such old hat, that one would think most businesses really understand this. Not so, the good folk of American Express. As a process hawk, I love a good process on the one hand and get a bit OCD about bad process on the other; […]