“If you can come into a new country and grab a 40% market share in a particular segment in a couple of years, it’s usually not because everyone else there is doing something wrong…”
A retail banker reflects on some of the more egregious mistakes made by western groups in emerging Europe before the financial crisis (foreign currency mortgages, anyone?)
“We are almost at the 'bring out your dead' phase of the market”
One CLO manager is less than complimentary about asset selection
“We have a few nice dinners, but they don’t lead to much collaboration. They just lead to indigestion”
A banker is candid about how much referral work really happens between two supposed partner banks
“If I think back two years, a quick update on what the bank was doing about digital might have been the five-minute postscript after the main business of the executive management committee meeting. Today, digital is the centre-piece of that meeting. Sometimes it’s pretty much all the exco talks about”
This head of digital says his bank’s leaders have finally grasped that failure with digital could be terminal
“One of the issues we now face is that businesses are devising new digital offerings with clients but that can leave a lot of our own staff out of the loop. So we need our own internal site for them. Of course, we want this to be more fun than the dreaded one-hour-a-week compulsory online training session. But we certainly keep track of who’s visiting and who isn’t. If a coverage officer is going to a client and thinks ‘Oh my God, they’re going to ask me about blockchain’, there’s now somewhere that banker can go and read up for 20 minutes, so they can walk into the client and be an instant expert”
His colleague lets slip that some aspects of banking will never change