The biggest news stories of the week include:
"Too big to fail" must end for all: FDIC chief (Reuters)
Report on Wall Street banks' bailouts says US Treasury misled public (Guardian)
The demise of the dollar (Telegraph)
Britain overtakes US as top financial centre (Telegraph)
FSA's tough new liquidity rules could cost British banks up to £9.2bn a year (Telegraph)
SEC Wants Authority to Gather Real-time Data on Swaps (Securities Industry News)
London Stock Exchange's market share falls to all-time low of 60pc (Telegraph)
John Thain: It's 'Unfortunate That the American Dream Has Been Demonized' (Knowledge @ Wharton)
HSBC chief fears a second downturn
(Financial Times)
New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud
(Wired)
And our key stories of the week include:
A few folks seem to disagree with my assertion that branch-based
banking is dead (posted
last week),
but they may have misinterpreted my assertion as being branches are
dead. They’re not. Branches are very much alive and kicking ... just
not as transaction centres.
Do bankers understand retailing?
We enjoyed a meeting of the Financial Services Club this week with
Bob Bayman, a director with i-am associates who designs bank branches. After my recent tirade against branch-based banking, you may wonder why we would have a branch design discussion at the Club. Answer: branches are still required, just in a different way.
EU project to track all your tweets
I stumbled across Wikileaks
this week, a website that leaks all sensitive information into public
domain. One of the leaked documents is the European Commission's Working Package 4
(WP4), which aims to crawl Facebook status updates and
Twittering tweets to see if you're a terrorist or anarchist.
At the Deutsche Bourse Open Day for IT, I chaired a panel comprising
senior figures from Eurex, the International Securities Exchange and IBM.
The focus of the panel was the future of trading technologies, and was
a wide ranging discussion covering everything from dark pools to high
frequency trading (HFT).
Like most good conferences, the Deutsche Bourse Open Day had sponsors.
Each of them had a moment in the spotlight and one firm claimed to have the equivalent
of 30 football fields of co-located data servers connecting the world of trading.
We’ve spent years trying to break down barriers to clearing and
settlement in the securities settlement markets ... and yet most of
those barriers are still there.
But they will disappear and as we look at innovations in payments (retail
and commercial
payments covered in last two posts), the final thoughts on
this study payments in the trading and investment markets.
How politically incorrect is the banking industry?
I posted the non-PC ad from Optivert last week which comes on the back of plenty of other politically incorrect items, such as the bank with strippers. Now there's an interesting new development: the female bank employee calendar.
One step ahead of the card fraudsters
The UK Payments Administration released the latest fraud figures which show general card fraud is down 23% to £232.8 million in the
first half of 2009 although, of concern, will be the fact that online
fraud is increasing at a rapid click (55%) year-on-year.
Ann
Minch of California posted an angry little video about Bank of
America's policies on her credit card in mid-September. As a result, Bank of America were forced to do a policy u-turn.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
