While banks march on apparently as if nothing happened in 2008 nor the years leading up to it, there continues to be a host of regulatory and investigative work continuing.  The latest is from the New York attorney general office who are pursuing an inquiry into pooling practices, ie, the dreaded derivatives and Asset Backed Commercial Paper in particular. New York Investigates Banks’ Role in Fiscal Crisis | NY Times Officials in Mr. Schneiderman’s office have also requested meetings with representatives from Bank of America,Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized … Continue reading NY Attorney General launch inquiry into pooling (derivatives) practices amongst big banks

Customer service and marketing can easily get out of sync with each other.  We were trying to sign up for a movie tonight on Rogers and the service kept crashing.  I phoned the technical support group, and got the usual suggestion from the CSR to reboot the box.  However when digging deeper with him he readily admitted that the Rogers service had capacity issues and had had service issues for the last several months.  The frustrating part of that conversation is that he knew why we had a problem before we began but the company still made him put us … Continue reading Marketing and technology must work together | Rogers please listen

I missed the rumour that Ally Bank is in talks with ING Direct.  It was put out there first by the NY Post on 10th May, 2011. Sources told The Post that Ally, the automobile and home mortgage lender, is looking to acquire the online banking business to boost its deposit base and further fortify the lending giant, which accepted a taxpayer handout during the height of the financial crisis. ING Direct could fetch as much as $10 billion in a sale, according to source This follows the EU Commission requirement that ING in Holland divest its insurance business following … Continue reading Background to the ING Direct story and the rumours of Ally Bank interest

Some strategic shifts amongst the ‘universal banks’ (HSBC, Citi, Lloyds, Bank of America, JP Morgan). The first is cost cutting. Global colonisers stage retreat to corporate banking | ft.com Increasingly, the heads of so-called universal banks – those that combine high street banking with corporate and investment banking – are deliberately shifting their focus away from foreign adventures in retail branches and on to corporate business instead. HSBC is not alone. Citigroup, its main global competitor, is busy pulling out of a host of retail markets where it is overstretched, such as Spain, Greece and Belgium, and refocusing on just … Continue reading Universal banks show beginning of shift away from retail to corporate

The US government has 800 data centres and one CIO.  He has set a target of shifting 25% of the government’s $80 billion in annual IT spending to cloud computing. The benefits are associated with cost savings.  These benefits are tempered with concerns about data security, and physical location of the servers within the US. Cloud Computing’s Tipping Point | InformationWeek There are few technology trends the U.S. government is embracing with such fervor as the cloud. In his Federal Cloud Computing Strategy report, published in February, federal CIO Vivek Kundra set a target of shifting 25% of the government’s … Continue reading Are Governments and Banks worrying about the wrong problems in the cloud?

The big debate at the moment is whether we are into another technological bubble.  This is fuelled by the valuations of FaceBook, Groupon and Twitter.  But there is a deeper issue, and this Bloomberg article by Ashlee Vance does a really good job at capturing it. His general thesis is the differentiation of foundational technologies and those that sit atop the foundational technologies.  He makes the point that there is nothing particularly new about FaceBook, Twitter and Groupon.  He notes that Groupons legacy for the world is cute emails. Worse, the smartest people in Silicon Valley are the mathematicians and … Continue reading Whats next after clicking ads?

More information today on the US NSTIC strategy.  (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace).  http://www.nist.gov/nstic/ I was sceptical about the initial promise although who cannot appreciate the concept.  There is more NSTIC pdf in this doc just released.  The document is all about the benefits of being able to be known anywhere online and reduce passwords down to one password.  Those benefits are easy.  The core question remains as to how identity is proven by the Identity Provider (IDP).  The document says the right things here, but the devil remains in the details of how this will be achieved.  … Continue reading More on the NSTIC but still not enough on the policy for ID verification

The forecasts and predictions that Niall Ferguson was making last year are coming home to roost.  This is an early warning shot across the bows of the US lawmakers.  S&P kept the rating at AAA but the door is now open a crack for that to change.  S&P and the other rating agencies looked like Pollyanna lemmings before the credit crisis, so you can bet they will not let that happen again if they can avoid it. S&P cuts US credit outlook to ‘negative’ “We believe there is a material risk that US policymakers might not reach an agreement on … Continue reading US debt comes under negative scrutiny by S&P