Trends in Financial Services

A community to discuss the future of financial services and any other interesting trends, strategies, ideas, views.

Retired Member 

US Fed playing Monopoly with taxpayers money

A few years ago I was invited to a fancy dress party where invitees were asked to come as their “favourite childhood memory”. It may sound strange, but I went as a giant Monopoly board. I have many happy memories of playing Monopoly with my younger brother. Sometimes I would win, sometimes I would lose, but it usually ended in one of us realising ...

25 September 2008 /regulation

Retired Member 

Real markets for real people

I've often read that the percentage of end-user activity in the Interbank foreign exchange markets on a daily basis is somewhere between 1% and 3%, and I suspect I could probably find a similar percentage of activity in other areas of the wholesale markets such as interest rate derivatives Speculative activity and risk transfer is crucial in the

22 September 2008 /retail

Retired Member 

MANDATORY Verified by VISA and UCAF SPA

Well, I'm glad APACS pointed out that the rise in 'take-up' is because of making it mandatory for cardholders. Not all merchants use these solutions, so the security coverage for cardholders is quite spotty. It's also understandable that consumers complain because both these solutions make it quite easy for fraudsters to phish cardholders out of th...

22 September 2008 /security /payments

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Wall Street is history

Wall Street is history. Official. The news from New York that Wall Street's last two investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are to convert into tightly regulated bank holding companies marks the end of an era for the capitalist economic system. The investment banking model that for decades has powered a global boom in leveraged finance,...

22 September 2008 /retail /wholesale

Retired Member 

UAE banks hit by surge in ATM fraud

The news article just mentions changing the pincodes. Changing the pincodes is not enough. The card numbers can be used for card not present transactions. Will there be another lawsuit much like what happened with TJX? Will this breach be used once again to 'promote' EMV and blame countries who have not fully migrated to EMV? If issuing banks allo...

11 September 2008 /security

Jonathan Rosenne Chairman at QSM Programming Ltd.

Could EMV have prevented the TJX breach?

I quote from the Boston Globe: "In one of the first interviews by a top TJX executive following a record security breach, vice chairman Donald G. Campbell told the Globe that the US payment system should follow countries in Europe and Asia that have rolled out credit and debit cards embedded with computer chips. If the cards were in use world...

08 September 2008 /payments /retail

Retired Member 

Recession Vultures

The increasingly dismal markets are presenting a unique opportunity for those with cash to shop for distressed securities that will potentially increase in value again. Case in point: John Paulson. Yes, that would the John Paulson, whose funds made billions of dollars last year by betting agasinst US subprime mortgages, and who generated returns

08 September 2008

Retired Member 

Codeless Quant Strategies

In a hedge fund, a prop trading desk or any high geek power trading environment, there is a chaos that is by now familiar. It is hard to imagine a world in which PhDs in physics, mathematics and statistics are not translating mathematical strategies into scripts and code libraries; where IT developers are not integrating them with the rest of the ...

03 September 2008 /regulation

Retired Member 

The next security target is not a bank

Most Australian banks have successfully rolled out two-factor authentication, which means the security spotlight is starting to shift to the weaker links in our online economy. Whether its retailers looking to offer financial services, or online social finance sites like Wesabe or Mint, it seems security vendors and analysts have found a new fish ...

21 August 2008 /security

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Rethinking micropayments

How do you define a micropayment? In the early days of the Web a micropayment was defined as 1/1000th of a US dollar. With the Internet providing a shop-front for the sale of small value items - such as a software application or an individual news story - the search was on for an economically viable means of conducting such miniscule transactions....

13 August 2008 /payments