Macaskill on markets: Deutsche Bank’s lessons for SoftBank
His former employer has never recovered from the excesses of the era, when a group of derivatives experts built a trading business that eventually proved to have serious long-term risk-management flaws. The day after its recent stress-test failure in late...
Brazilian Trump offers hope, but less expectation, say risk analysts
Eye on the prize: But football fan Jair Bolsonaro’s chosen team is vulnerable to attack down the right wing… The elections in October demonstrated solid public support for the outspoken, right-wing Rio de Janeiro congressman and retired military officer Jair...
Why ING is turning back to insurance
ING’s announcement in June of a new insurance distribution agreement with France’s Axa comes after a tough period for the Dutch lender. Its share price performance has been worse than any other large-cap bank in Europe, notes Citi research. In...
Banks are not tech companies but they are full of IT risk
Aftershocks from the infamous TSB migration to a new IT system in late April, which was so badly bungled as to become a defining case study for generations of bank operations and technology staff to come, were still rumbling in...
US bank M&A: A red flag
Bank M&A in the US is back and it’s something to be concerned about. When Fifth Third announced it was buying Chicago-based MB Financial in May, it heralded what many had suspected would happen after the Federal Reserve lifted the...
A new golden age for banking?
JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive Jamie Dimon On a conference call arranged by Bernstein at the beginning of July, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive Jamie Dimon was on his usual bombastic form, but one statement stood out. When asked by...
Airdrops of free crypto tokens look set to replace ICOs
You don’t have to spend too much of your lunch hour trawling the polite corners of the internet – Facebook, Twitter, football supporters’ message boards – to pick up an invite from one of your virtual acquaintances to join Initiative...
EBA stress tests are past their sell by date
The European Banking Authority (EBA) stress test results came and went at the start of November and nobody paid them much attention. Are they even worth the effort anymore? This now looks like a test that the examiners – the...
Independent providers struggle in post-Mifid II research landscape
As the dust settles from the implementation of second Market in Financial Instruments Directive at the beginning of this year, it is now becoming clear who the winners are likely to be: large global investment banks. There has been a...
Direct lenders target real estate opportunity
Jeffrey Williams, fixed income fund manager, Schroders According to research firm Preqin, private capital assets under management in real estate doubled from $408 billion in December 2007 to $811 billion in June 2017. As banks show little appetite for a return...