I was talking about lots of things yesterday but one conversation sticks in my mind more than any other: who will Lloyds sell their branches to? This is all wrapped up in a debate with the European Commission dating back to 2008, when the UK government flouted competition rules to approve the emergency merger of…
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…
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….
** 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…
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…
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”,…
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…
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…
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…
