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At a leather-decked boardroom table in the backwaters of Whitehall a group of smart City gentlemen meet with some rather scruffy governmental characters to talk about a deal. For the purposes of this story, we’ll call the smarts Eric, Bob, Stephen and Stuart, and the scruffs George, Andrew and Mervyn. Bob, with heavy American overtones:…

Some people had an issue with the number of personal financial management (PFM) solutions that were presented at Finovate last week. To be honest, they had the same issue in New York and in other innovation events preceding. Why? Because the view is that PFM is a mature market that started with firms like Mint…

For the third year running, I was involved in the Card & Payments Awards. This year I was one of the judges and, last night, the sixth annual ceremony took place at the Grosvenor House in London hosted by comedian, Marcus Brigstocke. Bank of America gained the most awards by clocking up four trophies, two…

Talking about best execution and stuff today, we got into a debate about whether banks were worried about trashing the trust of customers or were concerned about changing behaviours. My response is that banks aren’t that bothered about trashing trust of retail customers as retail customers don’t make them money. The mass deposits of itsy-bitsy…

Oliver Wyman launched a new report at Davos last week that has garnered a few headlines. Titled: “The Financial Crisis of 2015: An Avoidable History”, they suggest that although financial services executives and regulators have worked hard to design a more stable financial system, they might fail as there are other market stresses that could…

I was having yet another discussion about bonuses this week and boy, are we fed up with that discussion. Or maybe not. The reason for the maybe not is that we were talking about whether bankers being on salaried versus commission structures is better or worse as a business model, following the survey last week…