As five of the world’s largest banks pay fines totalling $5.7bn (£3.6bn) for manipulating the foreign exchange market it seems a good point to look at some underlying problems in the financial markets. Firstly let’s be clear: I am not looking to exonerate the Banks involved. They have been deservedly punished for their crimes. And …
Category: Regulation
Feb 14
How can HMRC have missed this?
After all the revelations about alleged tax evasion at HSBC’s Swiss Private Bank came a further shocking disclosure. The whistle-blower at the centre of the scandal, Herve Falciani, offered information on bank account holders in Switzerland to HM Revenue and Customs and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in 2008. How can they have missed it? …
Jun 01
Painting yellow lines under the car..
The Back Office can party as well as any Sales Team. But at a gathering at the end of last year of Leasing Operations and Accounting folk, the festive spirit concealed dark problems and challenges to be faced in 2013. I carried out a straw poll and somewhere between a third and a half of …
Feb 19
Beefy Lessons for the FSA
The Food Standards Agency and the Financial Services Authority, as well as sharing an acronym, could both learn lessons about regulation. (I know that the Prudential Regulation Authority is technically becoming the regulator but the pun of the FSA was too good to resist). No tests had been done for Horse DNA in beef for …
Feb 19
A tale of two regulators..
The UK Financial Services Authority Mission ‘If we are to get it right, we need to aim high. So we have set ourselves a challenging corporate objective. Our mission statement will be along the following lines:- The Financial Services Authority will aim to be a world-leading financial regulator, respected for its professionalism and integrity both …
Apr 15
Compliance testing
I was chased today to complete my overdue mandatory compliance training. So I spent a few hours completing the training and the test. The result? “Test Passed The exam contained 14 questions, of which you answered 13 correctly, or 93%. These are the questions you answered incorrectly: What are the consequences of failing to complete …
Jun 01
Achieving efficiency in a new dimension
My introduction to pan-European finance technology came on the day Europhile Tony Blair became prime minister. After casting my vote, I drove to my companies newly opened Paris office to struggle with installing a French version of Windows 95 from 24 floppy disks. Since then I have become well versed in the benefits and practice …
May 01
Go Forth and “Multi-”ply
Going multinational opens up multiple extra dimensions in system complexity. The biggest strategic efficiency for multinational systems is gained by having front-end, administration and accounting systems that can travel in these extra dimensions Multi-Format – Culture-specific number formats (thousand and decimal separators) currency symbols (prefixes or suffixes) and date formats are essential to present users …