The Finanser’s Week: 21st June – 27th June 2010

The biggest news stories of the week include ...

• Judge rebukes Barclays chief at Lehman hearing - The Independent
• Santander sole bidder for the UK branches EU told RBS
  to sell - The Telegraph
• Goldman Sachs 'will be hit hardest' by regulation -
  The Telegraph
• Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein 'advised to go on
  Oprah' - The Telegraph
• Battered eurozone left vulnerable to crisis, warns
  Fitch - The Telegraph
• Ben Bernanke needs fresh monetary blitz as US recovery
  falters - The Telegraph

And our biggest stories of the week are ...

The credit crisis was NOT a Black Swan event
(Part Two)

Ten years ago in the US of A, Sandy
Weill put great pressure on Bill Clinton's office to repeal the
Glass-Steagall Act with some success.  At the time, Senator Byron Dorgan said this would lead to major bank failures and taxpayer bailouts.  Boy, how right he was. 

French and German banks have almost $1 trillion exposure to Southern
European economies according to a Bank of International Settlements
(BIS) report released last Monday. Read this post to download the BIS report
and checkout Europe's fragile economy.

Spent a lot of time yesterday talking with folks about the future of
money, payments and banking.  The conversation got interesting in
two particular areas: branches and mobile services.  And
suprisingly, the two areas reflect complementary strategies reflecting
whether the bank provider is in an emerging or developed economy.

Why
is there no global mobile remittance
service?

We had a really interesting free-ranging conversation about
remittances and new services for remittances yesterday.  Oh
yes, I should say that I’m at a remittances conference so that’s the
reason why.The discussion was about the NEXT BIG THING in money
transfer ... or rather whether and if there is a NEXT BIG THING in money
transfer.
To be honest, there’s not.There’s just mobile.

A SWIFT note on remittances

One solution for the underbanked discussed in some depth is SWIFT’s remittance services for banks. It is not
surprising we discussed this in depth, as SWIFT are the premier
conference sponsor.  The service focuses upon those banks that
are trying to build bilateral services or using open correspondent
banking services.

Great conversations continue in the remittances / money transfer space,
with a chat with the global transaction services folks from a major
bank.  This bank has a dilemma: are they in the remittances space
or are they not?  They really want to be in this space but are
worried about risk exposures, particularly reputational risk.  My
recommendation: don't bother.

With perfect foresight, where would you invest?

I recently blogged a lot about 10,000 year thinking, the Long Now and
how it relates to financial services.  We followed this up with a
discussion of the Long Now of Finance at the FSClub the other day and it
got me thinking that if we had perfect foresight, where would we invest?

The post-holiday reality blues

So, it’s just a couple of days since returning to work and I’m
already fed up. My PC’s decided not to load Adobe
apps. Then my iPhone fell on the floor and broke, the crown
on my tooth fell out, my credit card has been defrauded and I’m no
longer on holiday.  And then, to cap it all off, the new UK
Chancellor George Osbourne tells us that UK, France and Germany are all introducing a bank
levy.  So ... to cheer me up ... I
thought I’d post a couple of holiday photos on the blog.

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