In the dialogue of the past week or so, an interesting theme has emerged. The theme is globally harmonised rules. In fact, there appears to be a tectonic plate shift towards some form of global neutrality. What I mean by this is that historically, the English have disliked the French and vice versa; the Americans…
Just back from Athens at a conference on retail banking with the star attraction being yours truly … well, I thought I was the star attraction until the post-lunch heavyweight speaker Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco, turned up … I remember hearing Tim Mason, Tesco's Marketing Director, back in 1997 talking about internet…
Most banks have evolved from days of branches and large offices, to banks with multiple channels of distribution and extensive technology backbones. The issue banks have with this structure is that the technology backbone is broken. This is well illustrated by a comment from one payments manager who said to me that he gets his…
After my meetings in Moscow last week, I’m wondering whether there is a Russian model of investing that could work with our Anglo-Saxon world of trading and meeting one of the key guys at MICEX, the Moscow International Currency Exchange (nothing to do with one’s gender), gave me a different view of Russia’s position. As…
After my meetings in Moscow last week, I’m wondering whether there is a Russian model of investing that could work with our Anglo-Saxon world of trading and meeting one of the key guys at MICEX, the Moscow International Currency Exchange (nothing to do with one’s gender), gave me a different view of Russia’s position. As…
When talking with bankers, they refer to banking as "a utility". It’s just something that’s there, like gas and electricity. It’s not valuable or differentiated and no-one wakes up wondering how their payment will take place. That’s why it’s not priced or serviced as something of value, but just thrown out there and use it…
