News on financial sevices sector

On 25 January 2023, the FCA published the findings from its review of firms’ plans to embed the Consumer Duty (the “Duty”) within their businesses. These implementation plans should have been agreed by firms’ Boards by the end of October 2022.

05.06.2020 / Cloud Computing

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Around the Cloud in Eighty Days: The First Leg of the Journey

Jules Verne authored the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours in its native French, which was published serially in 1872. It would presumptuous of me to rescript the story of the unflappable Phileas Fogg’s trip around the world, but allow me to take you on a ten-legged journey to explore how the Cloud can enable productivity, innovation, and scalability in financial services.

14.05.2020 / ESG Rating

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Blind Reliance on ESG Data and Rankings — The Seeds of the next Mis-selling Crisis?

In early 2019, a survey of financial advisers had already revealed serious misgivings over the possible mis-selling of products marketed to investors as ‘ESG friendly’. 97 of every 100 financial advisors in the United Kingdom (UK) had declared themselves as either “very” or “fairly” concerned about the potential for allegations of mis-selling ESG investments, according to market research firm Cicero.

07.05.2020

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The Cloud and the future of finance

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of co-authoring a short article on the adoption of the Cloud in Financial Services with Professor Nelson Phillips of the Imperial College Business School. We conducted several interviews with senior leaders in financial services about their experiences of moving to the Cloud. It turned out to be such a captivating journey that Nelson and I are planning to continue along this path and turn it into a much more comprehensive piece of research.

16.04.2020 / Coronavirus

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Never waste a good crisis: the strategic challenges of rapid cloud adoption in financial services

One dramatic impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been the rapid acceleration in the digital transformation of organisations as much of the workforce has been suddenly forced to “WFH”. The ability of organisations to close physical offices and continue operating rests largely on various kinds of cloud services providing distributed, on-demand availability of data storage and computing.

30.03.2020 / Remote Working

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How to maintain business productivity with hundreds of employees working from home

With Covid-19 wreaking havoc on business and the economy, the only ideal solution is to respect Government guidelines while continuing business as usual — from home. The problem is, how can an organisation, in particular a financial institution, give hundreds or thousands of employees secure access to the documents and applications required to work from home without disruption to service?

20.03.2020

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IT & DevOps in Financial Services (The Phoenix Project)

If, like me, you have to interact with IT —and technology is vital for you or your clients — this excellent novel will enlighten your day-to-day work. The Phoenix Project was first published in 2013 and, in the fast-moving world of technology, one could view this book as ‘outdated.’ But no. The way it articulates the value of DevOps for organisations remains insightful. It remains useful. And it remains worth your attention. Of particular value is the presentation of the Three Ways — the principles from which all observed DevOps behaviours are derived.

02.03.2020

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Victor Hugo & the Green Swan: An Introduction to the threat of Climate Change on Financial Stability

There is something peculiar in the book released last January by the Bank for International Settlement and Banque de France, The Green Swan. The book builds on the concept of ‘black swans’ first introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, but this time the swan is green. Green swans (or climate black swans), the authors argue, are extreme financially disruptive events resulting from climate-related risks.

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