Opinion

Jan 18, 2010

Halifax’s marketing is the worst I’ve ever seen …

Every time the new Halifax ad comes on the box, I cringe … Now I’ve blogged about their awful advertising before and how insensitive it seems post-crisis, but this one really gets me down. Not only is it cheesy, poorly executed and raw, but it actually makes most of the folks I talk to feel…

Jan 18, 2010

What the Halifax should have done …

Thinking about the Halifax’s ads a bit more, some may say: “they are so bad, they’re good”, in a Shake & Vac sort of way (one of Britain’s most memorable and iconic ads – see end of blog entry if you want to see it). I disagree. The Halifax ads are just plain bad and…

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Jan 15, 2010

What is this f****r fee?

So yesterday’s big news is the new Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, the FCR fee or f****r fee as the bankers are calling it. This is Obama’s big idea to get back lost TARP funds, by introducing a tax of $1.5 million per billion dollars of liabilities on a bank’s balance sheet. The aim is to…

Jan 13, 2010

Survival of the richest

It’s been a difficult time for City bankers, what with all the flak over bonuses and easy money after almost bankrupting the world. The longest lasting row relates to bonuses and remunerations packages. This hit the headlines a year ago, and was debated here with the arguments for and against. A year later, and the…

Jan 7, 2010

Battleground 2010: Sharks versus Gorillas

After West Side Story, the Sharks got over the Jets and are now targeting the Gorillas. Actually nothing to do with music or film, we’re talking banks. Back in the 1950s you had large banks (Sharks) being run around by small banks (Jets) who were nimbler and quicker … so the large banks acquired them…

Jan 6, 2010

Who am I?

I’m sitting in the house. It’s snowing. Look. This is big news. We don't get snow in Britain anymore. Global warming saw to that. So when it's snowing, it's major news headlines. Non-stop BBC reports saying: "it's snowing". And so it's snowing, and Britain has stopped. Literally. Everything has closed down. We couldn't even get…

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 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 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…