SharePoint for Onboarding

Weird term, onboarding: anyone from outside financial services would be perplexed at hearing there is a specific term for  signing up new customers, or that it would be a problem. Yet at a Gartner conference two years ago, a consultant talked about what a big deal it was to be able to pre-fill forms when an [...]

Utility Banking — at the Supermarket

Will the debate about bank models be superceded by other players? In the UK Tesco is now offering financial products including savings, loans, mortgges and insurance, directly.
Wal-Mart tried to get into the business in the US a couple of years ago by buying a rather obscure sort of banking license, but bank opposition managed to [...]

FSA Liquidity Regs – Threat to London Banks’ Global Role?

The FSA’s new rules on liquidity management threaten to overload banks with reporting that the regulator won’t be able to understand while missing the source of the current financial crisis, said panelists at a Financial Services Club Capital Markets forum on 10 March.
Because the session was conducted under the Chatham House rule, this commentary doesn’t [...]

Trust, Faith and Finance

“… in connection specifically with the financial crisis, the main point is about what appropriate patience might look like where various financial and commercial enterprises are concerned. The loss of a sense of appropriate time is a major cultural development, which necessarily changes how we think about trust and relationship. Trust is learned gradually, rather [...]

Predictions for Obama Economics — Financial Insights

What will the next administration do? Financial Insights ventures some predictions.

“Financial Insights expects more legislation to protect consumers, incentives to reduce off-shoring, federal regulation of the insurance industry, more bank failures, and streamlining of
banking regulatory agencies.”
“Changes that will result likely include reform of mortgage origination practices, limitations on exotic investment instruments, the absorption of the [...]

Icelandic & UK Councils — Where Were UK Banks?

The list of local councils and charities and the amounts they had deposited in Iceland is astounding. But it does raise a big question — where were the sales reps from Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays, et. al.
Cheltenham Borough Council: £11 million in Iceland banks … Dorset County Council: £28.1 million … the list goes on and [...]

Banking Needs Big Bonuses — For Supervisors

Ah, here is a fresh idea from Charles Goodhart and Avinash Persaud  in the FT: give bank supervisors hefty bonuses that pay out over five years or so if the firms in their purview stay profitable.
Next on their menu is a revision to Basel II capital adequacy requirements that raises them by a ratio linked [...]

Basel III Coming in 2020, or Thereabouts

Philippe Carrel, SVP at Thomson Reuters, has been rounding up bankers, quants and technologists in New York and London to gauge the satisfaction with existing information on structured assets (very low) and create some standards that market participants can agree upon. Everyone knows Black-Scholes has some underlying problems but it provides an accepted way to [...]

Farewell to Free Banking, and Absurd NSF Fees?

It’s a well-known marketing ploy in banking – offer free checking and then hit customers with outrageous fees when they bounce a check – £40 or so in the UK for what American bankers called non-sufficient funds (NSF). Now the High Court has ruled the fees come under laws on fairness of contracts, governed by the  [...]