Shaping the future of finance
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…
Investment banking has had a rocky year all year. Pilloried by politics, public and the media, the investment banker is currently about as popular as a Vampire at a Blood Bank … not a bad analogy as the refrain all year has been about that giant Vampire Squid that is known as Goldman Sachs. Goldmans…
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…
