Trends in Financial Services

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

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Paper cheques are so 17th Century

A sign of the times: The Cheque and Credit Clearing Company (C&CCC) and Apacs, the UK payments association, has issued a new advice guide for consumers on how to write and receive cheques. Recent research conducted by C&CCC has shown that over half of all UK account holders are concerned about receiving cheques and around a quarter don't l...

26 February 2008 /payments /retail

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Do retail banks respond to emails?

I saw this survey last week that revealed 53% of UK banks fail to respond appropriately to online queries or emails. A US version of the same study last year found that of 72 banks surveyed, well over half - 67% - of firms did not provide satisfactory answers via e-mail. These survey results are obviously good marketing hooks for IBM and Kana (whi...

21 February 2008 /retail

Retired Member 

Move over Eastenders the next soap opera is here

Earlier this week, whilst catching up on news from America, I came across an article in the New York Times announcing, "The credit crisis is no longer just a subprime mortgage problem." Now no disrespect but I am sure the majority of people getting this newsflash from the New York Times have no idea what it really means. As for the rest...

15 February 2008 /regulation /retail

Ainsley Ward Vice President, Payments Solutions at CGI

Strange things afoot in the POS world...

When I worked for a terminal vendor a few years ago, I made a prediction that the market would quickly consolidate down to a few (probably 3) big players - and that they'd most likely be VeriFone, Hypercom & Ingenico - but what I didn't see coming was that the market would get as cutthroat as this. What's unfolding in the Hypercom/Ingenico/Th...

12 February 2008

Retired Member 

Back to basics for CIOs?

As Gartner predicts, apparently against the run of events, healthy growth rates in global outsourcing this year (8.1 percent IT & BPO), I wonder if financial sector CIOs aren’t actually considering the year with a wry smile? Despite contemplating a budget squeeze and the need to fully comply with regulatory issues such as MiFID and SEPA, they ...

11 February 2008

Retired Member 

Small Is Increasingly Beautiful

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

Retired Member 

What's keeping you awake at night?

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

SCARY MOVIE... prepare to SCREAM!

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

Retired Member 

Cloud computing - only cloudy or with silver lining too?!

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

Alan Goodrich Regional Sales Manager at ERI

Anyone got 1 Euro to spare..?

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