Regulation

May 31, 2011

Why governments are failing to regulate the internet

As mentioned, am in Abu Dhabi this week and will write more about the conference content during the course of the week but, today, am struggling a little bit as my blog is banned here. It’s the first country I’ve been to in my travels – and I’ve travelled lots – where I cannot actually…

Apr 19, 2011

Fall out from the flash crash

Another presentation at TradeTech that I was interested to hear was Larry Tabb’s. Larry is CEO of TABB Group, a research firm focused on capital markets that Larry founded in 2003 after several years leading TowerGroup’s Securities & Investments Practice. Due to our involvement in TowerGroup – I co-created TowerGroup Europe – Larry’s one of…

Apr 15, 2011

The regulator’s dilemma: being DUPEd

It’s pretty clear from recent issues that regulatory systems haven't worked. Take Gordon Brown’s admittance over the weekend that we made a mistake with bank regulation. The mistake was regulating individual institutions rather than the global system. That’s a mistake. But we have made many mistakes in the past and will again in the future….

Apr 12, 2011

Review: The Independent Commission on Banking Interim Report **

** out of a possible ***** And so the long awaited Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) produced it’s report yesterday, and we all went … hmmmm. Some went hurray: Shares in Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland topped the FTSE 100 yesterday, as the interim report of the Independent Commission on Banking stopped…

Apr 6, 2011

The latest chat on Basel III, the PSD and SEPA

This is an extract of the summary of discussions at the IPS conference, written by FSClub friend Heather MacKenzie. For the past few years the regulation debate at IPS has tended to focus on SEPA and the Payment Services Directive (PSD), but with the mandatory end date regulation soon to be voted on by the…

Apr 4, 2011

TSC lays UXB for ICB

I hate acronymns, but these are three good ones: TSC is the Treasury Select Committee; ICB is the Independent Commission on Banking; and UXB is an UneXploded Bomb. UXB is something that the TSC just laid for the ICB. By way of explanation, the TSC published a 100-page report titled “Competition and choice in retail banking”,…

Mar 30, 2011

Banks will absolutely be disintermediated

OK, so I said that banks would absolutely not be disintermediated last week, and it sparked some interesting debate and dialogue. A few folks were incredulous that I could say this; others thought it made eminent sense; some noted that the movement of money could be disintermediated, but the holding of money could not; whilst…

Mar 4, 2011

SEPA, ISO20022, Interoperability and more …

I was involved in a tweminar yesterday organised by Karen Hsu of Informatica, and in conversation with Nancy Atkinson of Aite Group. This conversation was all about payments and specifically SEPA, ISO20022, interoperability and more. It is also the second tweminar I've participated in – the first was with First Direct's CEO - and they are incredibly difficult…

Jan 28, 2011

If the banks are united, then the nations are divided

A good discussion yesterday about government’s powers to influence banks and control their behaviours. The conversation went something along the lines of the following. Governments are working hard to create unified systems across borders for commerce. An example is SEPA and the PSD, MiFID and the Lisbon Agenda of the European Commission. This is something…

Jan 12, 2011

Not just a banker, but a Diamond geezer

So we start the year as we mean to go on, with a bunch of MPs grilling a banker about bonuses, bailouts, lending and such like. Banker bashing 2011: same sheet, different day. This time it’s the turn of Bob Diamond, Chief Executive of Barclays Bank, to take the heat in front of the Treasury…