It’s the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week. It’s a big deal as the mobile operators and manufacturers announce their major news items for the year, such as Microsoft acquiring Nokia. That’s why Steve Ballmer is down there doing a keynote today along with Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. There’s Eric Schmidt,…
The Banking Year Ahead. Sounds like some sort of swear word but no, it’s all to do with predictions time. What are the big events of 2011 going to be? Barack Obama begins the campaign trail for election 2012. North Korea ignites a battle with South Korea that sees a distance divide between China and…
So, there are a lot of things we’re juggling around with in the payments arena, from real-time to TARGET2 to SEPA to SWIFT ISO20022 to mobile to contactless to biometrics and more. I guess I can summarise this area best by using the results from this year’s payments survey because the last section of the…
So this week I thought it worth posting a few reflections on 2010, the year that was, and begin with some thoughts on retail banking (tomorrow will be payments and Wednesday, capital markets). Surprisingly, retail banking has not had any really startling changes. Branches are still the focal point, as evidenced by Santander who increased…
I was at a fascinating meeting yesterday looking at developments in credit, debit and prepaid cards. There was a standout moment when we had a discussion about China Unionpay (CUP), China’s card processing operator. First a bit of background. CUP was set up under the auspices of China’s central bank in March 2002, and is the…
At the Euro Finance conference in Frankfurt this week was a stream all about transaction banking which yours truly attended. The great and the good of our transaction world were also in attendance, as demonstrated by this short list of speakers: Albert Lechner, Vorstand Zahlungsverkehr, Betriebs-Center für Banken AG, München Andreas Kaiser, Leiter Cashmanagement, Bayer…
So to the really interesting question: if the industry is a polluting, festering, rotten and foul mess, should we try to shut it down? The reason I ask this is that this is the question that came up as I was writing yesterday's blog, debating the similarities between the banking and oil industries. If BP and…
I recently chaired a conference focused upon FXMM, or foreign exchange money markets for those unfamiliar. It’s a strange territory full of hedging and algo’s, but the bit of the day that really caught my attention was when Heather Pilley from the OTC Derivatives and Post-Trade Policy Division of the FSA, presented the plans for…
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