Blog

The idea of the ‘perfect storm’ is one with which most of us are very familiar—the concept that, at certain times, a unique set of circumstances combine to aggravate a situation with potentially perilous consequences. Those of us working in financial services—and particularly securities services—in the UK are faced with a prime example of it: we are currently working against multiple combined challenges that together are limiting our ability to do business, to live a quality life and are hampering our chances of succeeding in our chosen line of work. Examples are myriad but include the ever-encroaching tide of regulation, which reduces [...]

As someone whose oratorical style varies between Elmer Fudd and Elmer Gantry—usually depending on my level of interest in the subject being presented and the volume/quality of preparation undertaken beforehand—I have always admired public speakers who can deliver highly complex topics in a clear, concise and confident fashion. We happen to be blessed in our industry with a disproportionately high number of such articulate people. Phil Brown of Clearstream, Peter Adams of BNY Mellon and Alan Cameron of BNP Paribas Securities Services are just a few of the star performers who can gain and hold an audience’s attention in exemplary fashion. A [...]

Have you ever considered that books and drugs are similar in many ways? The right ones, used in the right manner, can make you laugh, feel better, think more deeply or act as a fabulous distraction and antidote to your daily woes. The wrong ones, on the other hand, can make you cry, take you to dark places, constrict your mind and generally have a negative effect on your thinking and outlook. Thankfully, while to the best of my knowledge there are no Walter White-type characters out there in asset servicing land, it’s heartening to know that some of our brightest and [...]

One of my favourite sayings, other than that great politician Tony Blair’s “now is not the time for soundbites [but] I can feel the hand of history on my shoulder”, is that “everything in life is a trade-off”. Now, this saying can be applied to many situations, be it the hassle you put up with from your other half when staying at the pub for ‘one for the road’, the pushback from your body when you’ve gone the additional mile in training, or the benefit of deferred gratification when you make a spending splurge after a long period of parsimony. However, in [...]

Dear reader, have you ever noticed how significantly your immediate environment can dictate your state of mind and outlook? If your office, the weather or geographical location are sub-optimal, then it's only too easy to have equally grey, despondent thoughts. Over the last few editions of this column, I've touched on post-bonus blues, job insecurity and lack of respect/professionalism in the industry as topics. I suspect that it is no mere coincidence that those articles were written in the 'mizzle' of a Scottish winter or the equally depressing environs of a soulless office space in Central London. However, by contrast, I'm writing [...]

In 2005, the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, in one of his less warmongering initiatives, introduced what he termed the ‘Respect Agenda’. Based on Richard Sennett’s 2003 book Respect: The formation of Character in a World of Inequality, the basic gist was that all parties/stakeholders in a given situation should try to respect one another and get along for the benefit of the greater good, and ultimately, themselves. While in Blair’s case this was aimed at general community cohesion, I believe that there are parallels worth heeding in our asset servicing community, be it a community on a global scale. In [...]

Yes, that’s right, the annual fear-fest that is bonus time is upon us. With it comes dreams of Ferraris, ski chalets, Caribbean cruises and happy partners, as well as nightmares of having to pull the kids out of private school, make do with the old car for one more year at least, and not being able to even pay off last month’s credit card bill. Back in the old, bold, golden days of course, there were few such worries—whatever your firm’s/division’s/personal performance, you were guaranteed to receive your fair share of the spoils, and that figure was not overly dissimilar from that [...]

When many of us were young, raised as we were in the mid-1960s and 1970s, we were brought up to believe that our life would follow a fairly standard and idyllic pattern—school, university, career, marriage, children, and finally, a comfortable retirement, with perhaps a house abroad and zero financial worries. Our careers would have had an ongoing, uninterrupted trajectory from fun times as eager juniors through hard working, lucrative managerial years in our forties, before easing back in our ‘senior advisor’ fifties and finally packing the golf clubs and heading into the sunset. Our jobs would be rewarding and we would be [...]

Ego (noun) – def: (i) self-esteem: somebody's idea of his or her own importance or worth, usually of an appropriate level. But also, (ii) inflated opinion of self: an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a feeling of superiority to other people. The asset servicing industry has more than its fair share of ‘characters’—people who are attracted by, and can cope with, its huge rewards, immense challenges, high media profile and constant pressures. Given the visibility of these folks, via regular networking, conference speaking and attendance, as well as the fact that our industry, despite its global reach, can sometimes resemble a small [...]

While, in hindsight, some of my columns last year may have been a tad maudlin, I felt that they accurately conveyed the zeitgeist and prevailing mood of the market at the time: uncertainty, a lack of confidence and a semi-bleak outlook for the coming year. However, I’d say that has now changed. Whereas last year there was just a degree of blind hope that momentum would carry us to better things, there is now a palpable feeling of optimism in the air for a number of reasons. There are teasing hints that decent net interest income levels will return sooner than we [...]