Welcome to Finextra. We use cookies to help us to deliver our services. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you may change your preferences at our Cookie Centre. Please read our Privacy Policy.
"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world." John le Carré. As I near my 60th birthday I find I am reflecting on and analysing the time when I entered the City and the interv...
In what was the expected uninspiring budget, considering the confines of what the Chancellor could work with, he managed to pluck a real plum that could have considerable long term benefits for the ec...
One of the surprise corporate deals at the end of last year was ICE purchase of the NYSE Euronext. Most surprising because on the face of it this deal looks unbalanced and does not perfectly fit int...
Shareholder activists and individual private investors might not need to cover their faces in war paint or protest loudly outside annual general meetings (AGMs) any more to make a point, although it...
Reproduced by kind permission of the CISI Alex hates this time of year. It's when the bills from Christmas, which have lain unattended for many weeks, now need paying. This year they are a little ...
I have just recieved a e-mail from LinkedIn to say that i am i the top 1% of most viewd profiles from their 200m users. Gutted! I thought i was more famous than that! Anyway it does demonstrate the ma...
Like trains SEPA had a timetable, which like the railways is open to change due to foreseen and unforeseen circumstances. The SEPA project has certainly been on the slow line keeping up the train anal...
The first steps to creating a banking union have been safely negotiated and a course set that should eventually safeguard the tax payers from expensive banking failures. It will also put in place the ...
For those in the know, data contributions are an on-going problem for the integrity of financial markets. The subject surfaced this year with the Libor scandal, which despite moving off the front page...
FIX has become the major messaging protocol in global financial markets and has arguably been the single most influential technical development in financial markets in the last twenty years. To a larg...
Lunching with Iain Saville last week it brought back many memories of yesteryear, when the UK securities markets was reeling from the disaster that was the Taurus project. For those too young to k
I have been thinking a lot recently about networks and the sheer frustration and costs that abound in financial markets because the current market structures simply don’t work on any satisfactory leve...