9184 Results
Retired Member
Here are a couple of interesting ideas that I’ve heard in two different countries in the last week from different people. “If MiFID comes in on 1 November (note the ”If”) then it will come in gradually, and compliance mayl only be an issue from perhaps March.” “If we have an Execution Policy that states that we will continue to execute client order...
22 May 2007
My wife came back from her mother’s last night – her father, Norman, passed away last year, and they had been cleaning out his sheds. Norman was a two-sheds man. He had something for everything. She had brought back some of his tools in an old wooden ammunition box, full of odds and ends. It was like stepping back into the 1960s, when I first l...
21 May 2007
I was at a payments industry conference in Frankfurt this week, presenting a view of a major corporate treasury department about the nature of the bank-to-corporate relationship. If you’re trying to sell solutions to your customers, you have to understand their business and their problems. One of the questions is – do banks really care what their ...
18 May 2007
There are not many things nicer than, on one trip last week, being able to stop between appointments to have an ice cream with a colleague outside La Scala on a hot, sunny day in Milan. There’s nothing much slower than strolling down the street with an Italian colleague, ice cream in hand, and watching the world go by. Other than the speed at whi...
16 May 2007
Just been through Heathrow again, and off to Le Continent. Basic principles – no passport, no fly. That’s even more important for Brits, as the UK is not signed up to the Schengen treaty. In 1993, the EU’s Investment Services Directive (ISD) became the “Schengen” of European financial markets. If you are an investment firm or exchange registered...
The excellent article Chris Skinner wrote re: SWIFT numbers intrigued me. I wondered if you take these very simple parameters and use them to predict growth, what will SWIFT look like in the coming years? So, as one does, I took the figures he gave in his article and created a spreadsheet which is available by clicking here. (Okay, okay, I had t...
01 May 2007 /payments SWIFT Matters
See also Recovering Bank Charges - 1 Recovering Bank Charges - 2Recovering Bank Charges - 3 The 40 days are up and I called the call centre and spoke to Gary. The bank have apparently been trying to contact me (how?) to tell me that although they have received my request, they haven't received my £10. Given that this is my bank, and nowadays has ...
26 April 2007 /payments Trends in Financial Services
Warning - content contains some nostalgia. Nice piece on the BBC about the ZX Spectrum, brainchild of Clive Sinclair which hit the shops in 1982. Must have been around that time that I splashed out on one from the co-op in Norwich - and then upgraded it with a kit to a heady 48k of memory. Then after three weeks of further tinkering with a solde...
23 April 2007 Whatever...
I see the BBC are reporting that after a campaign by customers - Dell is again offering Windows XP with new PCs as an alternative to Vista. Michael Silver, research vice president at Gartner said this is odd behaviour for consumers - who tend to opt for the latest versions of everything. But is it that odd? Perhaps it shows that consumers are g...
20 April 2007
See Recovering Bank Charges - 1 and Recovering Bank Charges - 2. Just an update I am afraid - no results, yet! I hadn't heard from the Alliance & Leicester so over the weekend I called their call centre for an update. 'We do have 40 days in which to respond you know Mr. Doyle', Anne in Ashford said; 'and it is only 35 days'. She was somewhat ...
16 April 2007 /payments Trends in Financial Services
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