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London

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2013

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Economist Quartz

Michael Harte

Management Consultant / Programme Director at Okapi Solutions Ltd

Posts: 0 Comments: 4

Bio Currently advising and assisting small to medium-sized businesses with GDPR preparation and data privacy activities. Career History An independent consultant with over 23 years business change, programme management and project delivery experience within commercial banking, insurance, retail and broadcast media. I specialise in leading global teams in technology, business change and product development programmes.

Michael is Commenting on

Banks not ready for 'confirmation of payee' service

Completely agree with Ketharaman Swaminathan comments. As each bank must already have the customers name(s) associated with their account and sot code details this should be fairly straightforward. As an example (having been responsible for core banking implementation programmes), an Account Verification Service (AVS) - whereby beneficiary names are displayed to a user wishing to undertake an electronic transfer - has been in operation in Nigeria for at least 10 years now via the NIBSS switch. Other than merely not being a priority, why is this not already in place.

28 Apr 2019 Reply Read article

The rise of digital banking in Africa

Multiple opportunities for banks and other organisations to develop and improve the digital banking landscape in Africa. However, how many banks would be prepared to 'share' the customer ownership they have today? Fintech firms will eventually mature and move from merely licensing their platforms, etc., to the banks to disintermediation, i.e., becoming the known brand and being the face of banking. There's no loyalty owed to established banks by the younger, tech-savvy generation - they merely want a service delivered seamlessly, quickly and, preferably, at a lower cost. Looking at banking in the cloud, where core systems can be shared rather than trying to be used as another USP, will accelerate the relationship change and potentially further de-link customers from their actual bank.

17 Apr 2019 Reply Read article

Starling chief slams Treasury over RBS fund allocation

IMHO I think Anne Boden is right here. The 'vision' (and in order to avoid mandatory EU fines) was to enable the diversification of the UK banking sector. Nothing against the larger banks, but this action appears to have the effect of reducing the sums available to the challenger banks to invest in growing their businesses and thereby effectively challenging the established banks? A fairer option, perhaps, may be to allocate a lower proportion of the available funds to those tier 1 & 2 banks?

24 Apr 2018 Reply Read article

RBS aims to move one million customers to new mobile bank - Forbes

As a previous commentator opined, "So, who can see this going well?" My greatest concern from the article is what sounds like mandatory, non-voluntary Nat West customer migration to the 'new' bank. That's a recipe for disaster, especially from a business perspetive, as the action is likely to encourage customers to move away from any RBS brand. Technically, RBS will be faced with either a piecemeal or bulk customer migration neither of which will be ideal - the former due to the timescale involved and the latter due to the 'mandatory' migration implied. But, hey ho, let's see how things go........

24 Apr 2018 Reply Read article