Stanley Epstein

22/01/2010 | 955 views | 2 comments
Legacy Thinking

I have just been running a series of training courses in Johannesburg on various banking subjects and something that one of the course participants said really struck a chord in me and in the group that she was a participant in. What happened was this; we had been discussing the various barriers to...
Tags: Online bankingGroup: Innovation in Financial Services

24/11/2009 | 1474 views | 4 comments
The Cheque is More than a Payments Instrument

So the venerable old cheque has been singled out and "tapped" for termination - in the UK at least. Of course, in the new world of electronic payments and instantaneous communications, the demise of the cheque was inevitable. A payment instrument devised in a simpler time, the cheque representing a ...
Tags: Payments

21/10/2009 | 957 views | 1 comment
The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

Where has the financial services industry gotten itself to in these past two decades or so? I have just been reading the Financial Services Authority's proposals regarding the reform of the mortgage market in the UK. What on earth has happened to basic lending principles? The FSA speaks of a change...
Tags: Risk

19/10/2009 | 960 views
Is this just a Bad Dream?

So Goldman Sachs is in the news again. According to a recent article in the New York Times the firm and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank's 140-year history. Imagine that? Just a few months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars given to them as a part of a re...
Group: Innovation in Financial Services

15/09/2009 | 1443 views | 2 comments
Is SWIFT Succumbing to the Dinosaur Syndrome?

The news item "Staff cuts ‘inevitable' as Swift contends with declining volumes" (FINEXTRA News, 14 September 2009) triggered some wider thoughts that I would like to share. SWIFT's need to restructure and to contain operating costs is not in my view simply a result of the financial crisis an...

More blog posts

12/09/2009 Risk Management? You Must Be Joking!

616 views
Tags: Risk

12/09/2009 Are We Heading Into Chaos - Again?

652 views
Tags: Payments, Sibos

15/08/2009 Risk management - why all this soul searching?

1133 views
Tags: RiskGroup: Innovation in Financial Services

31/07/2009 This bank could be dangerous to your financial health

1252 views
Tags: Risk

29/07/2009 Do banks really understand innovation?

1812 views | 4 comments
Tags: RiskGroup: Innovation in Financial Services

17/07/2009 Has the financial industry learned nothing?