Blog Index

Our biggest stories of the past week are … SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard and T2S? The Financial Services Club is repeating the survey started in 2011 reviewing the changing face of payments infrastructures.  We would be delighted if you would join this year’s survey: click here to take part. UK House of Lords to investigate reform of…

Our biggest stories of the past week are … What's banking got to do with the Price of Fish? Professor Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris (see bio's at end of blog entry) are regular guests of the Financial Services Club, and were invited back to close the London season of meetings with an engaging discussion…

Our biggest stories of the past week are … SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard and T2S? As we enter the summer break, the Financial Services Club has two free offers for SWIFT Community members. First, join our research into payments infrastructures and get a free copy of the results: click here to take part.  Second, come to our…

Our biggest stories of the past week are … Barclays advert Everyone in my twittersphere has been retweeting this picture. Diamonds are forever  I wrote a brief summary last Friday about a wholesale need to change the industry and thought that was it … it’s not. I need to write more about this heap of…

Our biggest stories of the past week are … RBS-NatWest proves that technology IS the bank  The big news at the end of last week is that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) had a computer crash, affecting all of the UK bank including NatWest and Ulster Bank. It caught headlines worldwide: NatWest and RBS…

Our biggest stories of the past week are … Is it just me, or is everything just … I’m having one of those days. It started off OK, and then it just went downhill. So I was going to blog about various market opportunities and ideas in banking and then thought: sod it, time for…

Our biggest stories of the past fortnight are … Metro Bank: 200 branches by 2020 A couple of years ago, I was talking a lot about Metro Bank. The reason being that it is Britain’s first brand spanking new retail bank in living memory. The bank has since received lots of free publicity as the……

Our biggest stories of the past fortnight are … Is the Queen worth it? After two days of a jublicious love-in for our Queen, you have to ask: is she really worth it? And, according to British Airways Business Life Magazine, the answer is a resounding yes. The article discusses how much the Queen costs…

Our biggest stories of the week are … The end of 'free' banking In the 1970s, the UK's Midland Bank introduced a new competitive service – free banking. It wasn’t free of course, but it appeared that way. The idea being that if you stayed in credit, they wouldn’t’ charge you anything. It… Lázaro Campos…

Our biggest stories of the week are … The multibranded bank Having made the claim many times that banks are not great at multichannel but excel in a single channel, I got into an interesting debate last night with the CEO of one UK bank.  He was asking whether branch-based banking had a future.  I…