As I sat listening to George Osborne’s Budget the other week I was wondering what major impact, if any, it might have on the banking sector and, of course, on the price of the pint in my hand that lunchtime. Well the ‘journalist tax’ on beer went up by 4p unfortunately and bankers weren’t spared [...]
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“Cash is my competitor. I get pleasure from seeing the amounts of cash used going down and I don’t like to see customers using our cards to visit ATMs.” So said Peter Ayliffe, chief executive of Visa Europe, last night at Lloyds of London during an FS Club speech entitled ‘The Cashless Society’, which also [...]
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The reporting season is underway, with Barclays going first this year announcing record profits of £11.6bn for 2009 and the traditional claims and counterclaims can be heard. The ‘silly season’ at newspapers used to be in August when Parliament recessed but it seems we now have another period of the year when papers get on [...]
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I’m looking forward to the Banking Technology Roundtable tomorrow, sponsored by Logica, on the SEPA end dates debate and future strategies for the Single Euro Payments Area. Will the controversial end dates of Q4 2012 for SEPA Credit Transfers and Q4 2013 for SEPA Direct Debits envisaged by the EC be implemented or delayed for a [...]
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Word has it – from respectable sources – that Michel Barnier, the incoming Internal Markets Commissioner, thinks Stock Exchanges should be part of the national infrastructure. Hmm. In some eyes, an exchange should assist with the creation of an orderly market. You can certainly put a case for MiFID creating a disorderly market. Outgoing Commissioner Charlie [...]
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Nice comment from criminologist and broadcaster Professor Laurie Taylor on BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme this morning: “If you steal someone’s savings or pension you’re more likely to end up with a yacht than a jail sentence.” He’ll be expounding on this in a full Thinking Allowed programme this afternoon, and there is a wider [...]
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Uh oh – FT columnist Gillian Tett is quoting a French sociologist … This sort of thing could get dangerous, but it looks intriguing. Drawing on her time in Japan, which prompted me to pull her book about the experience off the shelf, she reminds readers that westerners were constantly telling Japan they had too [...]
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“What keeps you awake at night?” In interviews with more than 1,000 C-level executives at firms around the globe – including 54 financial institutions – IBM researchers trotted out that standard question. Quite a number of deep issues, it turns out. “A very high number of financial services executives, 80%, is figuring out what their [...]
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Among the stories covered last month by the Banking Technology team for our Sibos Daily News sibling was the French Banking Federation’s reaction to a statement by the European Commission and the European Central Bank in early September, saying they would only support the idea of a multilateral interchange fee for Sepa direct debits for [...]
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Amazing how fast this has been moving. The Wall Street Journal has provided excellent coverage with in-depth reporting including the corporate politics that mostly occur well out of sight. (The Journal’s editorial page remains, as it has been historically, mostly a source of comic relief.) Pity the poor weeklies – the news keeps coming over [...]
Filed under: Credit Crunch, regulation, risk, Technology | No Comments »
