45 Results
John Cant Managing Director at MPI Europe Ltd
Whether it is certain bonuses in financial sector, or league tables and performance stars in the public sector, there have been numerous recent illustrations of the harm that poorly set business targets can cause. It seems deceptively easy in theory to use targets and rewards to drive desired behaviour. Take the mine detecting bees for example. No...
31 March 2009 /regulation /wholesale Trends in Financial Services
There have been calls this month from the European Union for the creation of a pan-European regulatory body to help solve the current financial crisis and prevent future issues. This is a deceptively easy thing to call for in the current climate, but it neither makes it easy to implement, nor indeed is there much evidence that it would be any more...
06 March 2009 /regulation /wholesale Trends in Financial Services
If Murphy’s Law didn’t already exist, they would have had to invent it to help explain what has happened to the financial sector over the past six months or so. Over the years there have been many proverbs or sayings predicting the inevitability of disasters. However, it fell to one Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. around 1949, whilst working on a serie...
19 January 2009 /regulation /wholesale Banking Architecture
The demise and subsequent break up of Lehman Brothers will provide strong case study material for many MBA courses, for many years. There are several lessons to be learnt beyond the crucial role of customer confidence in business success. For example, there are the difficulties involved in splitting or decoupling the heavily centralised Lehman IT ...
30 November 2008 /regulation /wholesale MiFID
Excel is a powerful tool. Like a chainsaw, in the hands of a skilled operator it is hugely effective – but in untrained or rushed hands and without the proper safety equipment it can be positively dangerous. This latest story of spreadsheet mayhem is just another illustration of the power to get it wrong. Microsoft themselves understand that for s...
15 October 2008 /regulation /wholesale Operational Risk Management
Well not the most obvious question I know. Boris Johnson – London’s headline grabbing mayor – and Wikipedia – an on-line encyclopaedia with definitions generated and maintained by its users – don’t seem to have obvious overlaps. However, they do both generate strong polarised opinions. Take Boris’s famous, or should that be infamous, “ping pong” s...
03 October 2008 /retail /wholesale Trends in Financial Services
As we can see from this news on JP Morgan's takeover of WaMu, hardly a day has gone by over recent weeks without a new banking takeover being announced. The ability of the acquiring banks to merge, integrate and leverage their new purchases has now become strategic to their future success. Even if they have made their purchase at a heavily discoun...
29 September 2008 /regulation /retail Operational Risk Management
Whether you call it commission sharing or unbundling, it seems a deceptively simple process, at the conceptual level at least – you normally split the commission on an equity deal into at least two elements (traditionally denoted as execution and research) and distribute these portions appropriately. Following an agreement, known in the UK as a CS...
04 July 2008 /wholesale MiFID
So why this cryptic title? Well, if, like me, you have picked up a newspaper one evening over recent weeks and flicked through past the natural disasters, credit crunch and housing crises to try to find some lighter material, you may have ended up on the “puzzles” page. The typical page will have a selection of brain teasers including the traditio...
31 May 2008 /wholesale Trends in Financial Services
My previous blog on Faster Payments posed the question whether some/all UK banks were seeing Faster Payments as an opportunity or sideshow? Still an open question I believe. So it was interesting to see an article quoting Paul Taylor - Head of International Market Development at Vocalink - promoting the wider application of the base infrastructur...
20 March 2008 /payments UK Faster Payments
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