This is a guest post by FSClub friend Tom Groenfeldt. Michael Joseph Gross raises some fascinating, and disturbing, questions in “Silent War,” in the July issue of Vanity Fair. Apparently drawing on extensive contacts in the rarified world of extremely talented hackers, and finding some corroboration from government and ex-government types, Gross recounts a consumer attack…
Twenty years ago, I was inspired by Mike Hammer and James Champy’s book Re-engineering the Corporation to start a consulting practise in business process re-engineering (BPR). I had just been made redundant from a firm that automated office processes with workflow technologies (yes, they had them back then, just after the Ice Age thawed), and thought…
Reinforcing the idea that traders in the City have no diplomacy or tact, here's two adverts from online trading firm AvaTrade. Their newest ad obviously forgot about something called 9/11 … … whilst their previous ad got banned for sexual inequality. Obviously, equality is not 3 + 1 (and is it just me or is…
I was in an interesting debate yesterday about the future of banking, as usual, and the future of branches, yet again. It was all interesting stuff. Then one of the presenters – a design agency that created and designed the Apple stores – talked about designing branches for people, not money. He illustrated this with…
I just got a heads-up about an interesting project taking place in Citibank called Darbie. Being aware of the challenge of new start-ups like Simple and Square, Citi are concerned that they might be disintermediated from the customer relationship, as are most old guard banks. But rather than ignoring this threat, Citi has taken it…
The hardy perennial discussion of whether we need branches or not comes up again this week. It’s a regular debate on the blog and in the Financial Services Club, with various entries that are relevant to contribute towards the debate: To dump or not to dump the branch (2007) Branches Wanted: Dead or Alive? (2009)…
Following on from yesterday’s blog about the challenge of taking a vertically integrated bank and breaking it into pieces that can be assembled as part of an alternative service, such as a mobile app, reminded me of the build my own bank presentation from February 2009 (can this really be four years old already?). The thing is…
Following on from yesterday’s blog about the challenge of taking a vertically integrated bank and breaking it into pieces that can be assembled as part of an alternative service, such as a mobile app, reminded me of the build my own bank presentation from February 2009 (can this really be four years old already?). The thing is…
I was trying to find out about the UK Government's Funding for Lending Scheme and why it isn't working, and managed to meet a senior small business lending manager with one of the UK's largest retail banks. He spoke to me off the record, but here's a summary of the discussion. It's pretty enlightening. I've…
