Finextra50 fintech index

The Finextra50 Financial Technology Index is a free-float value weighted index of the world's leading companies that provide technology-based products and services to the financial services industry. It was set at an indexed value of 100 at market close on Friday 4th May 2007. This is a community for discussing the index, its movements and wider M and A activity in the fintech world.

Retired Member 

Hedge Funds Turning to I-Banking

Last month Citadel Investment Group announced that it is launching an investment banking division. The company sees huge potential for transactions going forward, and given its outsize capital base, has the distribution network and liquidity at its disposal to execute. Other firms could follow suit, such as publicly-held Fortress (FIG). But is t...

05 June 2009

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Smoke, mirrors and financial accounting

How did the basket-cases of the US banking industry manage to post such, relatively, healthy results? It's all done by sleight of hand, as Dealbook helpfully explains. I particularly liked Goldman Sachs' stunt of simply eliminating a bad month from its quarterly report. That's financial genius at work. Are US banking executives so schooled in the ...

22 April 2009 /wholesale

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Stat of the year: That ABN Amro valuation revisited

A variation on this stat has been doing the rounds for a few weeks now, so forgive me if you've seen it before. I picked this up from the aptly-named Doomsday Report blog. In October last year, RBS paid $100 billion for ABN Amro (80% cash), and faced a fair amount of shareholder opposition to the valuation. If they were to use that money today, ac...

10 December 2008 /retail /wholesale

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Vendor risk: The tables have turned

I was speaking to a software vendor last night who recently had a big project go live at one of the UK's largest banks. When the project was first signed, the vendor was quite a small company (though it has since been acquired). Because of its size, they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get the deal done, with the bank quite sensibly wanti...

10 December 2008 /payments

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Successful Citi tech spin-outs

This story got me thinking about how many businesses have been spun out of Citi's tech and business support subsidiaries over the years. Besides the sale of this unit, and the BPO unit that went to TCS last month, there were also I-Flex (now Oracle Financial Services Solutions, but first founded by Citi in the mid 80s to support the bank's Indian ...

04 November 2008

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Breaking down a bank's IT budget

It's not often that you see a full breakdown of exactly how much money a bank has spent on different projects within its overall IT budget. At least not in the public domain. But at Westpac's earnings announcement yesterday, CEO Gail Kelly picked the bank's technology operation as its most notable "low light" during their financial year....

31 October 2008 /regulation /retail

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Conflicting views on software and IT services spend

Further to my recent post -- It's not all doom and gloom for financial technology -- I've been reading a few predictions for IT spending in 2009. Some choose to focus on the positive -- for e.g. spending on risk management systems is growing. While others look at the state of software and IT services more broadly, and are much more pessimistic....

20 August 2008 /retail /wholesale

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

It's not all doom and gloom for financial technology

While banks might be cutting rates for IT contractors - see Navjeet's blog post from last month, and the Barclays announcement yesterday - it seems quite a few vendors are still doing well. For core banking system vendors in particular, there has been a spate of good financial results. In its quarterly announcement today Temenos net income wa...

30 July 2008 /retail /wholesale

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Egg looks fragile as Citi begins sell-off

Citi's decision to offload its profitable retail business in Germany could mark the start of a major re-alignment for the US bank's vast overseas network. Citi has announced plans to shed $400 billion of non-core assets over the next three years in an effort to rebuild profitability and shrug off recent losses. The German retail operation was the ...

11 July 2008 /retail

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Just how much is Thomson Reuters worth?

Further to my previous post on Merrill Lynch's ruminations over whether or not to shed its 20% stake in Bloomberg (Just how rich is Michael Bloomberg?), maybe we should also be asking: Just how much is Thomson Reuters worth? Shares in the vendor rose 48p to £13.07 Monday as brokers began to re-evaluate the company in light of the £3 billion to £6...

08 July 2008 /wholesale