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A community to discuss the future of financial services and any other interesting trends, strategies, ideas, views.
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Retired Member
There is a trend underpinning Web 2.0. It is a turn to the small - the micro, the nano - whether in payments, transactions, communications, niche, enterprise or economy. It may be too early to label this as a paradigm shift, but the expansion of the microsphere is clearly underway. While the "micro" prefix may be largely associated with ...
10 February 2008
Having been on the road and transitioned through 4 continents since early January, I have spent many a recent hour in an airport lounge counting airplanes and people watching. With my wife and children left behind in good old "blighty" I've had plenty of time to ponder the current turmoil in the financial services industry. As I laid a...
08 February 2008 /regulation
Alan Goodrich Regional Sales Manager at ERI
Seriously, those of faint disposition should have a cushion handy to hide behind! How often do we read about and debate the moral dilemma of mere mortals "playing God" in areas such as medicine, e.g. stem cell research, and physics, e.g. creating anti-matter – but do we ever have that debate in financial services? On the publicly availabl...
01 February 2008 /regulation
With the amazing speed & success of Google, cloud computing has emerged as the leading edge paradigm of computing architectures. The "newness" (or "fogginess", as the cynical banker is apt to think!) of this concept can be gauged from the fact that a Google search "define: cloud computing" results in zero results...
28 January 2008
On 5th March 1995 Dutch banking and insurance group ING bought Barings for £1 and assumed liabilities of over $600m. According to some McKinsey research presented by Mark Lawrence at a PRMIA event I attended in London on 18th December 2006, based on a sample of more than 350 operational loss events, normalized for industry performance, the decline ...
28 January 2008 /regulation
Just when you thought the subject had safely swam off quietly into deeper waters, frightened off by crazed French bankers; the debate resurfaces thanks to those nice analysts at Celent.
28 January 2008 /retail
Once again the vulnerability of global financial institutions is illuminated by the operations of a single individual. Today's announcement of EUR5 billion in losses at SocGen adds to an ever-expanding list of Nick-Leeson style trading debacles - Chinese metals trader Liu Qibing's copper loss of $100 million, a Mizuho broker's sale of 610,000 sh...
24 January 2008
It would seem that we have entered a period of bipolarity in global financial affairs. On the one side we have (Eastern) sovereign wealth funds charged with investing vast sums amassed through explosive economic growth (China, Singapore) or the skyrocketing price of oil (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia) and on the other, (primarily Western) private se...
22 January 2008
Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra
Some recent headlines from the past month: Barclays chairman loses £10,000 in ID fraud scam Halifax facing Chip and PIN fraud lawsuit Dutch cops arrest 14 ABN Amro customers as phishing mules Phishing losses hit $3.2. billion in 2007 – Gartner Barclays faces protest over clunky PINSentry authentication Question: Are banks losing the plot – and the ...
11 January 2008 /security /payments
Mobile finance is indeed on the rise, and all indications are that this industry will be at the forefront of transformation in global financial services. This is perhaps no more apparent than in development finance where mobile technology is leveraged to deliver financial services to the unbanked. M-PESA, for example, a money transfer service ope...
07 January 2008
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