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Nice one, Mick!

Mark, thanks for your comment.

I get your point on regulatory issues and I do agree, particularly when it comes to providing investment advice.

However there are many insights which can be provided online by financial institutions to assist their clients over and above the basic reporting of transaction details and without crossing the regulatory line. Those are the ones I was referring to.

It might be better to call it money management and financial literacy 101 then, rather than "financial advice". Take spend analysis, proactive alerts and anomaly detection or peer comparison and benchmarking, for example. I insist that the online channel is an excellent medium for this kind of more intelligent transaction reporting, whether you're on the Web-based channel, tablets or smartphones apps.

And please let's remind ourselves that cheques are also physically dangerous for your health: http://bit.ly/pdC4P8

And then there is also the likely negative impact of Basel III on trade finance...

As it stands today, and as been reported like never before, from the G20 to national banking associations, Basel III advocates increased regulation and further constraints on trade finance instruments to meet its admirable objective of tackling excessive leveraging.  Lower-risk traditional instruments, such as Letters of Credit (despite their short-term nature) are included in this treatment because, among other things, of the rigidity of its one-year maturity floor on all lending facilities.

Trade finance would suffer under the proposed Basel III recommendations by bearing a flat 100% credit conversion factor because of the off-balance sheet treatment. There are ways to circumvent this with the Advanced Internal Ratings approach, but this arguably is only really possible for the larger banks as it requires extra effort and resources for retrieving the in-depth historic data needed for reporting. 

For most of the regional and local banks, such Basel III proposals would result in a poorer situation for the majority of banks than under Basel II – and indeed it will be significantly worse than Basel I’s 20% credit conversion factor for trade finance. We cannot and must not let Basel III be even worse for trade finance than its predecessors.

Now, if we trust the final line of a recent press release from the Bank of International Settlements indicating that "as requested by the G20 Leaders, the Committee will also evaluate the impact of the regulatory regime on trade finance in the context of low income countries", there might be hopes that we will end up with fair treatment in the final version of the revised rules so that the trade finance industry and therefore global trade will not suffer. Fingers crossed.

A podcast without a dedicated RSS feed associated to it is not a podcast.

Without the feed, I cannot subscribe to it for automated download to my audio device. So, unless I have missed the RSS subscription link somewhere, the weekly Finextra audio file as it stands is useless for me.

Oh my golly, a troll on a Finextra blog. To react or not to react to such an outrageous generalisation, that is the question...