May 10, 2012
What’s the benefit? Quantify the savings! Both well known chants in our industry and in other industries. Benefits have to be quantified. Fair enough. Quite often, as in many things in the financial services industry, I have seen some math that just does not stand up to much scrutiny, both in terms of reflecting genuine […]
April 30, 2012
The same for less or more for the same. That is one of the mantras of life in the financial services industry and probably in other ones too. The former could easily be re-stated as “save costs”. If you are in the Operational end of a bank, that goal is part of your diet, often […]
April 23, 2012
With the pint sized French President Sarkozy about to be kicked into the long grass, it seems only reasonable to move from Swiss muppets to a French one, albeit that at least two of the three bad guys in this story live in Switzerland. As many folks are beginning to realise, Swiss bank accounts no […]
April 16, 2012
With the Olympics almost upon us in London, it seems appropriate to have a Muppet team award. This goes out to the private bankers at Credit Suisse for their tri-athlon performance on behalf of their clients in matters structured products in the holy church of open architecture. (Editor’s note: I was at CS when these […]
April 9, 2012
Kiss & Tell at Goldman Sachs! With the joke about doing God’s Work getting a little old, one Greg Smith has done himself and the gossip columns a favour with that rather stinging and public resignation letter. Now first off, as best I can tell he was not badly treated at Goldman and did not […]
April 3, 2012
Editor’s Note: This is﹟7 in the series on Controls. All that heading stuff looks a bit funny in the emails, so I have dropped it. More. Yes, there’s more. Last week’s blog looked at the three basic elements of good process controls: One Screen, Score and Action. This week we will take it to the […]