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Paul Penrose

Head of Research

Finextra

Member since

06 Oct 2006

Location

London

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Paul's opinions

Gardner joins banking sector brain drain

James Gardner, head of innovation and research at Lloyds Banking Group, is quiting his position to join the UK Government's Department for Work and Pensions. What does this say about the role of innovation in the stricken commercial banking sector? In his BankerVision blog, James plays a straight bat to the obvious question: "Whilst most thin...

24 August 2009 /retail Where are they now?

The news in 147 characters or less

OMG. Twitter down. Hit by DoS attack. Facebook also grinding. Cyber-sabotage suspected. And we can't even tweet the news. World grinds to halt. Not

06 August 2009 /retail /wholesale Finance 2.0

Go-go years catch up on Swift

For a Swift geek like me, the publication of the co-operative’s annual report offers a rare opportunity to gauge the mood of the executive committee and the board ahead of the annual user conference. Often this requires some educated guesswork, reading between the lines and picking up on nuances in tone and emphasis in the opening messages from th...

23 July 2009 /payments /wholesale Finextra@Sibos

One trillion dollars visualised

Mint's online lifestyle mag does its bit to remind us all how deep in the mire we are with the snazzy 'One Trillion Dollars Visualised' animation. In layman's terms, that one trillion dollars would buy you a $3 latte every day for 900 million years. And that's only one-tenth of the current bail-out. Time to wake up and smell the coffee, people.

22 July 2009 /retail /wholesale Video extravaganza

Hey you, get off my cloud

Twitter has suffered an embarassing security lapse after a hacker stole hundreds of confidential documents and released them in the blogosphere. Explaining the break-in, Twitter CEO Biz Stone writes: "About a month ago, an administrative employee here at Twitter was targeted and her personal email account was hacked. From the personal accoun...

16 July 2009 /retail /wholesale Finance 2.0

Goldman fans flames for conspiracy theorists

Goldman Sachs hasn't had the best of press lately. A recent Rolling Stone article went as far as to describe the firm as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". Others have noted that the firm's tentacles spread into every area of government...

10 July 2009 /wholesale Whatever...

Naming and shaming the banks

The UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) has published proposals that for the first time will 'name and shame' banks with a poor record for handling customer complaints. The proposals would see firms publishing their own complaints data every six months and the watchdog would publish results from the whole sector twice a year. Introducing the ...

10 July 2009 /retail Whatever...

It's banking Jim, but not as we know it

Wells Fargo's Guided by History blog has unearthed a great architectural curio from the early 1970s. To celebrate its centennial year in 1972, NorthWest National Bank created and staffed a space age 'Future Bank', which was intended to give customers a peek at banking in the 21st century. Future Bank tellers were dressed like extras from Star Tre...

03 July 2009 /retail Finance 2.0

Micrososft sweats on TradElect review

Whoa! Run that by me again. The London Stock Exchange is seriously contemplating scrapping its £40 million TradElect system. The TradElect switch was flipped amid great fanfare barely two years ago, following a four-year development programme. The system, custom-built by Accenture and Microsoft, runs on HP ProLiant Servers and Microsoft .Net and SQ...

02 July 2009 /wholesale

What a bank!

That's the literal translation of CheBanca which offers an innovative take on the traditonal bank branch courtesy of Milan design studio Crea International. It's as sleek and cool as the Apple Store. Hat tip to Rob Findlay at the Bank Channel.

02 July 2009 /retail