Uncategorized

I know Barclays have some imaginative marketing ideas – for example, the excellent game 56 Sage Street, where teenagers are encouraged to play a game to earn money, rewards and responsibilities … … but did they really have to sponsor London Mayor, Boris Johnston?   p.s. they're actually sponsoring the London Cycle Hire Service, which…

I popped down to the launch party for Metro Bank last night, as the bank opens its doors for business this morning. Having previously blogged about the bank a bit and their challenges, to get off the ground is impressive. The bank was under wraps on arrival …  … but, as the Chairman and Chief…

Here’s a shocker. I blog all the time about social media. We all love Facebook, with 500 million people in their community. We love to twitter via tweetdecks 24*7 on our iPhones and Androids. We Google, Amazon and PayPal. The internet is pervasive. It is so pervasive that the country is going to ban paper,…

Having spent much of the weekend absorbing the European bank stress test results, I’ve got to ask why they bothered. OK, so it was to get bank share prices up, but the whole thing was just a typical European sham where every country does things in a different way, with the whole thing designed to…

I've talked a lot about Metro Bank already, and will probably talk a lot more about them as they are the first brand new spanking retail bank to launch in Britain since Charles Dickens popped his clogs. Well, almost. Actually, it's quite strange in that, like buses, you don't see a new bank launch and…

I spent most of Friday thinking about the news of Goldman Sachs record $550 million fine from the SEC (here's the detail of what they were accused of). The last fine of any consequence the SEC levied like this, in my memory, is the $100 million fine of UBS back in 2004 for supplying dollars…

A final posting on bank stats, but this time focused upon capital markets. According to the report from TheCityUK (which I cited a couple of times last week): Companies raised £83 billion on the London Stock Exchange in 2009, including £5 billion raised on AIM, the market designed specifically for smaller, high growth companies. An…