Should bankers come back to the office? Opinion is divided amongst the great and the good of banking C-suites (US and Europe split on bringing bankers back to the office, Financial Times, 10th May 2021).

These days, when it comes to off-shoring thinking tasks, a lot of banks are feeling pretty jaded with wherever their off-shoring has been done. Usually that’s India.

We all know that offshore analysts are hugely efficient for budgets. Unhappily, local research and risk analysts tend to resist increasing their usage.

It has been just over 9 months since my colleague Gunjan and I started supporting one of the CROs of a large Canadian bank.

From my 38 years of experience, my advice to new Financial Crime and Anti Money Laundering analysts is that you must understand the underlying crimes which create the problem funds.

There is no such thing as delegation of responsibility in a regulated industry. 

Talking to financial sector companies and investors about the future of their technology systems, I have been surprised to discover that one of the biggest attractions of cloud computing for them was something as simple as being able to automate software updates. 

You’re a risk manager who has been mandated to plan cost-efficient augmentation of your team. You’ve opened a file, done save as, what next? Read how to move from tabula rasa to a plan.

Costs need to come down in banking, so it’s inevitable that the CEO or COO will knock on the door of risk management and mandate offshoring or augmentation.

A few years ago I was asked to take up the challenge of helping to fast track top level Indian analysts into global capital markets.

When introducing or upgrading an augmented research team, banks, asset managers and risk managers often hope that their home centre teams will automatically work out how to collaborate with these resources.

Here are two things which I often hear from analysts who work with offshore resources, and I’ve been wondering how they can be consistent

A cup of tea, some toast and watching the news. That’s my morning routine for when I am working in my office.

The appointment of a dyed-in-the-wool retail banker as head of Deutsche Bank is at best a pointless exercise in the bank’s continuing search for a new identity in the post-2008 financial landscape. At worst it suggests a bank heading in completely the wrong direction.

Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Analysts at Frontline are mentored by city veterans, who add front-end knowledge and on-shore experience to their output.

The Financial Times and trade press are carrying a story about a leaked draft of the MiFID II research rules.

The Financial Times wrote this week about a powerful new trend – locating jobs where they can be done most efficiently

The big news from the latest note is that the FCA has (finally) recognised that for research to be sold to investors, there needs to be some allowance in the rules for free trial periods. 

The latest news on MiFID 2 is even less promising than we had expected