Opinion

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Many of us thought it a bit weird that Gordon Brown suggested bringing back the Tobin Tax last weekend during the G20 summit.  The idea is to tax every financial transaction, just a little bit, one or two cents on each … this way you can build up a fund …

Many of us thought it a bit weird that Gordon Brown suggested bringing back the Tobin Tax last weekend during the G20 summit.  The idea is to tax every financial transaction, just a little bit, one or two cents on each … this way you can build up a fund …

Many of us thought it a bit weird that Gordon Brown suggested bringing back the Tobin Tax last weekend during the G20 summit.  The idea is to tax every financial transaction, just a little bit, one or two cents on each … this way you can build up a fund …