Finextra community home

Finextra50 fintech index

The Finextra50 Financial Technology Index is a free-float value weighted index of the world's leading companies that provide technology-based products and services to the financial services industry. It was set at an indexed value of 100 at market close on Friday 4th May 2007. This is a community for discussing the index, its movements and wider M and A activity in the fintech world.

a non-active Finextra member | 05/06/2009 | 6566 views

Hedge Funds Turning to I-Banking

Last month Citadel Investment Group announced that it is launching an investment banking division. The company sees huge potential for transactions going forward, and given its outsize capital base, has the distribution network and liquidity at its disposal to execute. Other firms could follow suit, such as publicly-held Fortress (FIG).But is this ... Tags: Trade execution

Paul Penrose - Finextra - London | 22/04/2009 | 12069 views

Smoke, mirrors and financial accounting

How did the basket-cases of the US banking industry manage to post such, relatively, healthy results? It's all done by sleight of hand, as Dealbook helpfully explains. I particularly liked Goldman Sachs' stunt of simply eliminating a bad month from its quarterly report. That's financial genius at work. Are US banking executives so schooled in th... Tags: Wholesale banking

Paul Penrose - Finextra - London | 10/12/2008 | 9000 views

Stat of the year: That ABN Amro valuation revisited

A variation on this stat has been doing the rounds for a few weeks now, so forgive me if you've seen it before. I picked this up from the aptly-named Doomsday Report blog. In October last year, RBS paid $100 billion for ABN Amro (80% cash), and faced a fair amount of shareholder opposition to the valuation. If they were to use that money today, ac... Tags: Retail banking, Wholesale banking

Elton Cane - Independent - Brisbane | 10/12/2008 | 8160 views

Vendor risk: The tables have turned

I was speaking to a software vendor last night who recently had a big project go live at one of the UK's largest banks. When the project was first signed, the vendor was quite a small company (though it has since been acquired). Because of its size, they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get the deal done, with the bank quite sensibly want... Tags: Payments

Elton Cane - Independent - Brisbane | 04/11/2008 | 8008 views | 1 comment

Successful Citi tech spin-outs

This story got me thinking about how many businesses have been spun out of Citi's tech and business support subsidiaries over the years. Besides the sale of this unit, and the BPO unit that went to TCS last month, there were also I-Flex (now Oracle Financial Services Solutions, but first founded by Citi in the mid 80s to support the bank's Indian a...