Future

Jan 5, 2010

2010: what’s in store for the technology of banking?

After various predictions yesterday, including the return of Glass-Steagall and a Chinese bank buying an American or European one, today it’s the turn of technology. There are lots of questions about technology, such as: Will Google make us stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop? Will social relations get better? Will the…

Jan 4, 2010

2010: what’s in store for the business of banking?

Each year, I try to start the year with a few predictions of what will happen. Last year proved to be pretty accurate, although it was playing fairly safe. This year is fuzzier in outlook, with not a great deal of obvious trends emerging. But a few that seem likely are: Certainty in the economy…

Dec 22, 2009

A few incorrect predictions for 2009

After reviewing how my five predictions for 2009 did, I was fascinated to get a note from Business Week with the ten worst predictions made for the year. Mine did not make the list, but my good friend Stephen Timewell from the Banker is on there: "In short, under the robust leadership of Sheikh Mohammed,…

Dec 21, 2009

Five predictions: were they right?

Back in January, I made five firm predictions for banking in 2009. Those predictions were: More major European and American banks disappear There will be some spectacular failures in the BRIC economies A Global Financial Regulatory Body is formed The US will drop IFRS Solvent banks gain major market share. So what happened? 1) More…

Dec 18, 2009

Sberbank’s Branch of the Future

There have been many attempts to create the branch of the future (Accenture, IBM, John Ryan … Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, Umpqua Bank …), and so I was intrigued to hear that Sberbank in Russia had made a major investment in creating a flagship branch in Moscow. I meant to drop in during my recent…

Dec 17, 2009

Your next employee (Part Two)

Back in August, I blogged about the new generation of employee. This week, I joined a presentation with JP Rangaswami to talk about the impact of technology on our lives, and the subject of Gen Y and the new generation of staff came up again. For those of you who don’t know JP, he describes…

Dec 17, 2009

3,238 days to the end of the cheque

With the news that the cheque will end its life as a valid payments instrument in the UK on 31st October 2018, it's worth reminding all that it's not just old people who use them: But that the main usage is with businesses, who want to keep cheques. Because they like them for cashflow management….

Dec 7, 2009

Part Three – Real-time risks and opportunities

In the final part of this discussion of risks and opportunities in CEE, I was asked to give a view (see if you can spot me). So here’s my brief summary: What are the risks for the next year or two? First, we are still in the middle of what I call the internet,…

Dec 3, 2009

Part One – Future Risks and Opportunities: CEE

We had our final meeting of the year for the Financial Services Club in Central & Eastern Europe (FSClub CEE) this week, with an excellent panel discussion about the risks and opportunities across the region looking forward. This is almost a bookend to our opening FSClub CEE discussion of whether there was a credit crisis…