33,823 percent of Assets Off Balance Sheet.

Goldman Sachs held derivatives that totaled 25,284 percent of assets in 2008 and 33,823 percent as of June 2009 (source: FDIC SDI database). Why do these big numbers matter? They represent a form of ...

Day two at the International Payments Summit

While we were eased into this year’s International Payments Summit on Monday, yesterday’s sessions contained more heated debates. Discussions yesterday first of all turned to proposed Basel III regula...

Basel III to raise more hurdles to trade finance?

There is an interesting piece on voxeu.org calling for a fair treatment of trade finance under the upcoming Basel III rules. A majority of practitioners view Basel II as unfairly and dangerously toug...

Financial Supply Chain

Finextra's Best of the Web

Good news for all you news junkies out there. Finextra has introduced a new 'Best of the Web' news feed to sit alongside our regular output of breaking stories from the world of fintech. Much like our...

Don't force cultural check-out when building shared services

Shared services is a delivery model for business processes and information systems that has proven itself to be a great fit for insurance companies and financial institutions that have multiple lines ...

My impressions of the EBAM event

I just returned from London, where I attended a two-day conference on EBAM (more specifically, SWIFT EBAM). While it was a relatively targeted audience (approximately 60 people were in attendance), it...

Electronic Bank Account Management

The ATM was the last great financial innovation

How do you define innovation in finance? Are we talking about the creation of new synthetic debt instruments, famously decried by Warren Buffet as "financial weapons of mass destruction". Or...

Finance 2.0

Banks and social media - More substance or more Kool-Aid?

Finextra recently held a live Twitterview with Brett King, banking consultant and author of upcoming book Bank 2.0. During the conversation, King says that online banking will beat branch banking this...

Social Banks

Finra's social media mash up

Lots of chatter in social media circles yesterday about this report on the New Comm Biz blog cocerning a financial services employee who was allegedly forced to remove his LinkedIn profile in respons...

Finance 2.0

Getting the timing right for a SEPA end date

Many people I have spoken to in the industry believe that finally, in 2010, we will see the announcement of an end date for SEPA. It is something many of us have been calling for, and now it looks lik...

Tokyo fires blunt arrowhead

The Tokyo Stock Exchange has spent $140 million on the development of arrowhead, a new 'super-fast' trading platform that processes trades in five milliseconds, approximately 600 times faster than its...

So far, so bad...

It seems wrong to start the New Year on a sour note, but as we approach the two-year anniversary of the SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) go-live, it’s hard to find a silver lining to this particular cloud. ...