For years, I’ve been a fan of Star Trek, and have used their innovations in many presentations, but I’ve always wondered: how come there’s no money on the Star Ship Enterprise? Is everything free? Not exactly. My supposition was that the future world of Star Trek, bearing in mind that it’s set in the 24th…
I was chairing a conference about risk and regulation today, and opened with the view the it is the culture of banking that needs to change. You can force the change through regulation, but if banks really want to be able to prosper post this crisis, then it needs cultural reform. And it’s not about…
We are pleased to announce details of our Winter Season of meetings of the Financial Services Club, London. If you would like to attend any of the meetings, please go to the fsclub.net and register. Tuesday, September 25 2012 Alex : 25 years of satirising the City Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, creators of…
I just received a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) on new bank models based upon different styles of banking in emerging markets. According to the report, the BRIC economies and their brethren will account for 35% of global assets by 2016, up from 24% today and just 10% in 2004. Emerging market banks are growing…
I started another debate yesterday after saying that English is the global language. It is. It is not the largest spoken language – that’s Mandarin Chinese – but it is the largest global language spoken across borders thanks to the internet. English is spoken as a second or foreign language by an estimated 950 million…
Further to yesterday’s dialogue around TQM, I got into a conversation with a couple of folks about the fact that we don’t have real STP, Straight Through Processing, in most financial firms. One senior manager said that he had started focusing upon STP back in the 1970s and couldn’t believe that, thirty years later, we…
When I was growing up in business, there weren’t many management gurus around. In fact, I think there was just one: Peter Drucker. Drucker was the book for every student of management. He was it. Then I moved into industry and another book came out: In Search of Excellence. This one was by Tom Peters…
Which? Magazine stirred up the old debate about free banking yesterday, by publishing a report which shattered the image of free banking being free. They asked over 2,000 consumers how they felt about banks and more than 60% of those surveyed said they had paid a bank charge that they thought was "unfair, hidden or disproportionate"….
One of the reoccurring conversations in banking is trust. I’ve blogged about it many times, and it’s a point that arises in almost every conversation about how banks prosper. There are two sorts of trust here however. Trust in banks to do the right thing, and trust in banks to manage our money with accuracy….
