And now, the end is here …

And so another SIBOS comes to an end. This year, I’m quite pleased as it’s been a challenging SIBOS. The challenge was getting to it, as the hotels were all over Amsterdam and the shuttle buses were about as reliable as a politician’s policies.

No complaints however, as the agenda ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick.

Innotribe was great fun, with lots of chat about cloud and mobile computing and the fantastic debates about banking for the next century in the Long Now. The plenary sessions were pretty good too, with lots of headlines about regulations and policies, and the other conference and breakout room discussions were broad and deep.

Looking at the journals and magazines produced during this week, the headlines included things like:

• “Fixing the banks is not enough”, Stephen Hester, CEO, RBS

• “If the regulations are implemented as they are currently written, we could be seeing a 2% fall in global trade and a 0.5% fall in global GDP”, Karen Fawcett, Head of Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered

• “The European Commission should be very careful about opening up this debate (about different end-dates for SEPA for different countries)”, Gerard Hartsink, Chairman of the European Payments Council

• “I was astonished that no one seemed to care about all this money lying around”, Lars Millberg, SEB

Whilst my own headlines would include the response from one speaker when I asked what his highlight of the week was: “hearing our regulator say ‘fragmentation is not our objective’.”

What a week that guy had.

Another highlight was the Tulip Girl ...

... although I thought it a bit cruel that a friend asked her if she was a Daffodil!

Finally, my favourite quote of the week has to be over-hearing one banker saying that he had not had “sex with a sober girl until I was 39” ... as another colleague said, the girl was probably 59.

Enough.

The madness that is SIBOS is over, and here’s a few more memories ...