There was something a little surreal about this year’s Sibos. While the banking sector’s woes and the demise of Lehman Brothers were on everyone’s mind, it was almost business as usual on the exhibition floor, as vendors announced new products and banks plugged their services, with no shortage of champagne and canapes. The two bankers [...]
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With banks having lost half a dozen years’ profits since last August you might believe headlines which suggest that they are prepared to scale back business. Ah, but that does miss a key point. The banks may have lost, but the bankers didn’t lose past salary and bonus pay. So while it is inspiring to [...]
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After years of passivity and inaction, the SEC launched a ban on naked short selling of selected financial stocks over a weekend. Compare this to the decades it sat by and let a handful of credit rating agencies enjoy oligopolistic profits as the sole official guardians of investment grading. Now the SEC chairman, Christopher Cox, [...]
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It’s a lot to be proud of, this independent capitalist system that tells the government to get lost. Except when it doesn’t. Headlines yesterday were Fed Chair Ben Bernanke saying the bank will extend its lending facility for investment banks for another couple of months if needed. The Fed is also working with the SEC [...]
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In a recent report entitled SEPA: Banks are building it, but will customers come?, Celent analyst Enrico Camarinelli writes that the level of Sepa attention by corporate users is “very little, almost nonexistent.” He adds that the mandatory requirements of IFRS and Sarbanes-Oxley have put Sepa low on the corporate “to-do list.” Yet the crucial [...]
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A survey-based study presented this week by Deloitte in Paris has some interesting revelations about banks’ attitudes to MiFID, which the consultancy divided into two main categories: the pro-MiFID and the merely “MiFID-compliant”. You guessed it, the former are a lot more proactive than the latter. But more interestingly, Deloitte found that it was retail, [...]
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After lamenting the lowest common denominator approach taken by Sepa and the loss of functionality of its credit transfer and direct debit instruments compared to existing domestic instruments, corporates are taking the matters in their own hands. Keen to avoid a “mini Sepa”, the French Association of Corporate Treasurers (AFTE) announced in its latest newsletter [...]
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You’d think it would be easy and affordable to “electronify” business documents. After all, isn’t it much easier, not to mention faster, to email an invoice rather than send a hard copy in the post? Sounds simple enough, except that, in its infinite wisdom, European law demands that electronic invoices be digitally signed, with a [...]
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The Fed is reluctantly thinking that it might consider taking action against asset bubbles in future. Chariman Ben Bernanke still says it is hard to determine a bubble. Really? When tech stocks were trading at 50-100X earnings? When people in booming states like California were buying houses at 5-6X their income? When mortgage brokers were [...]
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Last month at The Forum in London, the MiFID conference sponsored by JWG-IT, David Wright, deputy director general, EU Commission, told bankers they should take the current financial crisis seriously. “The firms that created this mess have to step up to the plate. This is not the time for firms to seek de minimus solutions or [...]
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