Regulation

Andrew Tyrie: a Man with a Mission

Our last meeting of the year at the Financial Services Club featured Andrew Tyrie, Head of the Treasury Select Committee.   The meeting was held in partnership with the Industry & Parliament Trust, and a good night was had by all. In a packed room, Andrew talked about the government’s challenges and his own varied…

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Competition and choice in the banking sector

On Tuesday last week the House of Commons Treasury Committee took evidence from Eric Daniels, Group Chief Executive, and Helen Weir CBE, Group Executive Director, Retail, Lloyds Banking Group Stephen Hester, Group Chief Executive, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Benny Higgins, Chief Executive, Tesco Bank It makes for interesting viewing, although long – you can…

Talking about banker’s bonuses

“Now then Brasher, what’s all this I hear about a clampdown on bonuses?” Sir Winston Albert Grant, Chairman of MegaBank Corp (MBC) and generally known by his colleagues as WAG, roared across the table at Roger Hughes, the new Chief Compliance Officer for MBC. Roger was called Brasher by WAG because every time he came…

Trading Strategies: Garbage In, Garbage Out

I’m a little bit mature these days … some of you might even say old … but you realise you’re getting on when something looks like an antique and you realise that, when you first saw it, you thought it was the future. In my case, this would be the first mainframe I programmed. Way…

A question of definition

There’s a whole load of things we’re grappling with today, and not many people seem to know how to grapple with them well. There’s a challenge for example regarding definitions. Defining what is “systemically important” versus what is not. Defining what is “commercial trade” versus speculative. Defining appropriate levels of capital versus required levels of…

Understanding SEPA’s long and winding road

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…

The Regulator

I was thinking a lot about the recent news that the FSA has ordered all mobile telephone calls to be monitored for any trader or investment banker using a corporate mobile telephone. Great. It doesn’t seem like such a great idea though, as traders and bankers will just switch to personal mobiles or those of…

Stop banker bashing and start the banker reformation

So this morning RBS announce losses of £1.4 billion this morning, with various headlines reporting the news: RBS losses shrink on sharp fall in bad loans - The Telegraph RBS Narrows Third-Quarter Loss as Provisions Decline - Business Week The Royal Bank of Scotland sinks £1.4bn into the red – BBC Admittedly RBS has taken a battering, but their…

The similarity between OTC derivatives and cheese

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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PSD and SEPA research results 2010

The FSClub released the outcome of this year's survey on the Payment Services Directive (PSD) and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) this morning, sponsored by Logica, Dovetail and Earthport. This is the second year of the survey, and builds on last year's results.   Download the full survey report (2MB PDF): Download Report 2010 Here's…

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