The end of the first day of SIBOS and a mixed bag of new ideas and stale old ones.
Sure we had two keynotes from John Havens, President and Chief Operating Officer, Citigroup; and Tim Lane, Deputy Governor, Bank of Canada.
They were fine.
Boring but fine.
I was particularly incensed by the lack of anything worth hearing from John Havens.
He’s the COO for Citigroup and meant to be a big fish, so what does he say?
Here’s a few selected tweets I made during his session:
- John Havens says that capital can be defined any way you want, dependent upon who your regulator and location is!
- John Havens says solution to this crisis is more banks looking to follow the universal banking model ... I thought regulators believed the opposite
- John Havens says that Citigroup are the best representatives of the universal banking model … profitable with good capital strength and global
- I know that tomorrow, this plenary will seem very exciting when I read about it ...
He really was not good and, all in all, John presented an old view of the world.
In fact, I was thinking of starting a new gameshow: "Banking's got Talent".
John would have received three BIG "X's" fairly quickly and, as Simon Cowell, I would have said something like: "John, I'm sure you're good at something, but you've yet to show that you have any talent for it here".
Sorry John, nil points.
As one friend tweeted: “I never knew someone so senior could be so enthusiastic about ideas so old”.
Ah well, it was then back to the conference hall and the innotribe stream.
Pure relief.
I also finally experienced the main exhibition hall.
It’s pretty hard to find, as it’s hidden in the basement of the southern hall, miles away from the plenary room.
When you finally find the exhibition hall, you discover this treasure trove of gifts, free drinks and people desperate to talk with you even though you’re just a lowly media hack … or innovative entrepreneur, dependent upon your view of my world.
Anyways, it was nice to see some old and new friends around the exhibit hall and now it’s off to party as they say.
Think I need it after John Havens’ keynote …
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...
