44 Results
Stanley Epstein Associate at Citadel Advantage Group
Once upon a time e-mail was a simple uncomplicated affair. It was a fantastic tool for sending out and receiving communications in "almost real-time". We put up with those slow 64k dial-up modems. After all, this was state of the art hi-tech. Even with these delays this new fangled "e-mail" beat the pants of regular snail-mail
27 May 2011
The news this past week has been all about a Citibank mobile banking glitch. Apparently a flaw in a version of its iPhone m-banking application resulted in it improperly storing customer account information. Now this is something that could happen to anyone, you will say. But should it? The past year has seen an explosion of new banking services an...
31 July 2010 /payments Innovation in Financial Services
So the FSA is going to beef up on its staff in the oversight of the banks. As I see it, this approached is doomed before it even starts. The regulator, whether it is the FSA or any other, cannot match both the expertise and the innovativeness of the staff in the banks. The reason for this is simple. The regulator cannot compete with the banks in t...
19 March 2010 Innovation in Financial Services
In the 1960s and the 1970s it was “ban the bomb”. This was the popular and catchy anti-nuclear slogan. A half century later my slogan for the “tens” (twenty-ten that is). It is simply “Ban the Mobile”, and other similar wireless devices. I recently conducted a series of training courses and seminars in a major city and was downright put out by the ...
13 March 2010
I have just been running a series of training courses in Johannesburg on various banking subjects and something that one of the course participants said really struck a chord in me and in the group that she was a participant in. What happened was this; we had been discussing the various barriers to progress in the realm of electronic banking and th...
22 January 2010 Innovation in Financial Services
So the venerable old cheque has been singled out and "tapped" for termination - in the UK at least. Of course, in the new world of electronic payments and instantaneous communications, the demise of the cheque was inevitable. A payment instrument devised in a simpler time, the cheque representing a negotiable claim on the bank account of...
24 November 2009 /payments
Where has the financial services industry gotten itself to in these past two decades or so? I have just been reading the Financial Services Authority's proposals regarding the reform of the mortgage market in the UK. What on earth has happened to basic lending principles? The FSA speaks of a changed approach to a more "intrusive and intervent...
21 October 2009 /regulation
So Goldman Sachs is in the news again. According to a recent article in the New York Times the firm and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank's 140-year history. Imagine that? Just a few months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars given to them as a part of a rescue package, Goldman Sachs has announced that th...
19 October 2009 Innovation in Financial Services
The news item "Staff cuts ‘inevitable' as Swift contends with declining volumes" (FINEXTRA News, 14 September 2009) triggered some wider thoughts that I would like to share. SWIFT's need to restructure and to contain operating costs is not in my view simply a result of the financial crisis and the downturn in message volumes. There is als...
15 September 2009
It was fascinating, listening to Tony Lomas and Steven Pearson from accountants PWC, give an account on the BBC of events a year ago inside Lehman Brothers Europe, at the moment that the rug was pulled so-to-speak. Messrs Lomas and Pearson now control the winding up process of what some say was the world's largest ever insolvency Two observations ...
12 September 2009 /regulation
Welcome to Finextra. We use cookies to help us to deliver our services. You may change your preferences at our Cookie Centre.
Please read our Privacy Policy.