Many people ask the question “where is banking going next?” Facing a down market, legacy issues and a growing volume of regulation the traditional business is under threat. Plus a new generation of alternative providers – particularly...

The technology industry has become a battle ground for patent disputes. Some have questioned their value. But Apple’s recent patent victory against Samsung gives a really clear message on the importance of a separate point of view. But have some...

The recent furor over Wall Street’s handling of Facebook masks a deeper issue – banking’s almost paranoid discomfort with social networking. The cultures couldn’t be more extreme. While capital markets favor opaqueness, social...

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the recent Facebook IPO but less consensus over the long term value of the company. And bad news begets bad news. Even issues like outages gain national attention as if they were part of some deeper...

Popular mythology suggests younger people are more tech savvy than older ones; digital natives and digital immigrants divided by technology. Teenagers would rather text than talk. By implication, boomers are technophobes or at best neophytes. Future...

Several years ago at university I took a course in the economics of developing countries. Back then I thought I had stumbled on the most intractable problem mankind ever faced. Now with the world running out of resources perhaps the concept of developing...

$600 trillion – that’s the size of the derivatives market. 40 times the size of the U.S. economy. And it has long been one of the most opaque wonders of the world. So it’s no surprise that regulators are all over it. The consequences...

As described in a previous post, an Analytical Enterprise is one that leverages data to its advantage. This includes the hard-to-tame “Big Data”, which is too awkward to be managed by traditional means. To support this mining of Big Data...

At the recent Davos Summit, Big Data was described as an asset as valuable as currency or gold. Why this sudden excitement over something that has been around for years? Because the tools are now available for organizations to build a more powerful Analytical...

Many years ago, Walter Wriston, former Chairman and CEO of Citicorp, startled the world by claiming information about money has become almost as important as money itself. More recently, the World Economic Summit at Davos published a report implying it...

The way banks have competed in the past has been on the basis of assets – how many branches, products, how many countries they operate in – even how big they are. But the rules of the game have changed. These capabilities are less important...

Baseball is the arguably the most hallowed game in America. Trying to redefine baseball is almost like trying to redesign the American flag. It’s practically sacrosanct. Since the 19 th century, a player’s performance has been determined...

Bankers at BAI this year seem to agree that bricks and mortar banking is here to stay, despite the growth in digital channels. But the role of the branch would be very different and more enabled by technology. What the bank branch of the future might...

For years the ATM channel has been taken for granted by the banking industry. The focus of innovation has been on other channels like mobile, but this is rapidly changing. Evidence presented at BAI 2011 by BBVA Compass suggested that ATMs are very important...

President Clinton’s keynote speech at BAI this week reminded that this is an exciting time to be living thanks to advances in technology, but the world remains unstable. Uncertainty seemed to be in the minds of many delegates to the BAI conference...

History tells us there are certain watershed moments. Banking is going through such a phase. After decades of building systems around products, the industry must now build technology around customers, and, in particular customer relationships. Also, the...

Our future looks grim. The economic situation is dire with little relief in sight. But short term gloom conceals deeper shifts in an ever-changing environment. The future may be much brighter than it seems. There have been many turning points throughout...

We appear to be living in two economies with very different stories. One is the traditional economy, currently in the doldrums, and the other is our social economy, rising in value and importance, which is redefining how the traditional one works. ...

Banking moguls looking to extract more value from their businesses might take a leaf out of the media industry. Netflix is a huge media success. But it is far from unique. The media industry has long made more money through aggregating and distributing...

It’s been almost fifty years since Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, goof-balled the mobile phone into the popular imagination when he used his shoe for clandestine conversations. A lot has happened since then in the ‘smart’ phone world. Angry...

Written by David but inspired by Damien. For years, a business card has been the ultimate power statement, defining who we are by the title we have and the firm we represent. After a handshake we naturally exchange them. But what happens afterwards...

Now that SIFMA 2011 is behind us, let’s take a moment to look back on a conference whose conversations and content mirrored the extremes of our post-crisis world. This year the Leaders Forum explored two main topics – Dodd Frank implementation...

Passing by a colleague’s desk I was really impressed by his Twitter activity. Suddenly I felt that I was missing out on something big. The whole world was tweeting leaving me behind. Here was I, an occasional writer on social networking and technology...

It has been a couple of years since the worst financial crisis in decades, and it is clear that we need a fresh approach to managing troubled markets. For years weather forecasters have been trying to make accurate weather predictions, but a little...

Even before the financial crisis, financial firms struggled to get their enterprise risk act together. Then as now, structured products added a whole new layer of complexity. The problem is how to get on top of the data. Without the right data, risk management...