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.
So the venerable old cheque has been singled out and "tapped" for termination - in the UK at least. Of course, in the new world of electronic payments and instantaneous communications, the d...
Where has the financial services industry gotten itself to in these past two decades or so? I have just been reading the Financial Services Authority's proposals regarding the reform of the mortgage m...
So Goldman Sachs is in the news again. According to a recent article in the New York Times the firm and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank's 140-year history. Imagine th...
The news item "Staff cuts ‘inevitable' as Swift contends with declining volumes" (FINEXTRA News, 14 September 2009) triggered some wider thoughts that I would like to share. SWIFT's need to ...
It was fascinating, listening to Tony Lomas and Steven Pearson from accountants PWC, give an account on the BBC of events a year ago inside Lehman Brothers Europe, at the moment that the rug was pulle...
This is the time of year when the financial services industry, or at least the "techie" element heads off to some exotic venue for the annual SWIFT jamboree. SWIFT as we all know is the glob...
All of a sudden, now that the economies of many countries, not to mention the banking industry, is in tatters, we have dozens of articles and blogs all bemoaning the state of risk management and what ...
I have been reading of late in the financial press and various blogs how bank Boards are, all of a sudden embracing a culture of risk management. Suddenly they are into governance issues too. What rot...
A current question doing the rounds about banks and innovation really got me thinking. Are banks really interested in innovation or are these "innovators" just few and far between? When we s...
I have been following recent press reports with a growing sense of unease. What I am reading is that some of the big banks, including some that were only bailed out by their respective governments in ...
I generally find the subject of banking, risk management, payments and so on to be pretty serious stuff. After all I have spent my entire career dealing with the various aspects of all of this. I mu...
It never ceases to amaze me that in the world of banking two different worlds can seemingly co-exist side by side, each oblivious of the other. There are many examples of this, such as "sound ris...