Case Studies

One of the panellists at this week’s conference said that he employed twenty people whose sole duty was to find a way to destroy the business. I liked the idea of that.  It is a strong and emotive statement.  But what did he mean? “I employ twenty people in my innovation department who purely look…

One of the panellists at this week’s conference said that he employed twenty people whose sole duty was to find a way to destroy the business. I liked the idea of that.  It is a strong and emotive statement.  But what did he mean? “I employ twenty people in my innovation department who purely look…

David Bermingham was another recent guest at the Financial Services Club.  David was one of the NatWest Three, the three bankers who worked for NatWest in the 1990s and got caught up in the Enron scandal. What happened and how come David ended up in an American jail when he's a British citizen? Well, after presenting…

I was wondering what to blog about today, as it’s grey and cold and wet and miserable and … then I realised, I should blog about Russia. Here in London, we’ve gradually seen a takeover of some of our key financial and national assets by billionaires from the former Soviet Union states. Some of these…

At the start of this week, we had a discussion at the Financial Services Club about the issues at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) over the summer when their payments systems failed. It was a major failure that garnered headlines worldwide, with many banks saying: “there, but for the grace of God, go I”. Why…

This week has been fascinating with lots of discussions about branch versus no branch and financial advisor versus product seller. I was going to leave it at that, but feel one final blog post worthy of discussion and this is about the role of social media. We all talk about Facebook and Twitter in the…

I went to see a screening of a new film about Anonymous last night called We Are Legion: the Story of the Hacktivists. The film tells the story about the rise of Anonymous and the hacktivism movement, portrayed through interviews with many of the key players. The film includes some of my favourite discussion areas,…

I ‘ve been talking about contactless for years now  - I remember talking about the Octopus card system about ten years ago after it launched in Hong Kong in 1997 – and still find it surprising how invisible it is. Sure it got some coverage at the Olympics but some, like Forrester, reckon that NFC mobile payments…