Digital assets are a whole new world. The team at Vertalo is working hard to enable & connect that space by delivering innovative technology solutions to support the digital asset lifecycle. I am joined by Vertalo General Counsel and co-founder, Gautam Gujral, a US-based company focused on digital assets. Before Vertalo, Gautam worked in various roles in Prime Services at Credit Suisse and some way back he had a spell at the SEC. Some highlights: Vertalo's registrar or transfer agency tech supports both primary and secondary trading, ensuring holding period rules are obeyed and ownership changes are tracked A Dec 2020 no-action letter from the SEC has enabled new native digital offerings to be offered on ATS, Alternative Trading Systems or MTFs. This secondary trading is a vital enabler for the initial issuance Private markets are huge, but to date underserved; the combination of technology and regulatory openness will drive accessibility

Islamic finance. A different world? To help give us a perspective on this, I am joined by David Potter, who has spent the most recent part of his career in the Islamic finance space. Now he is working on a project to make the whole asset & liability lifecycle much simpler. David shares his observations on where the Islamic finance world differs from "Tradfi" and where it is the same. Some highlights: The Shairiah world places a lot of emphasis on having a proper audit trail The hard work is all in the pre-trade part of the lifecycle, for example negotiating agreements. Business process here is very manual; this is where David and his team at Connectif are targeting adding value with their new market place and automation There is a need for better infrastructure and this presents the same challenges as in "Tradfi"; herding cats and trying to encourage strategic rather than tactical behaviour

Cash is king. In this podcast, my guest is industry veteran Colin Parry, the CEO of ISSA, the International Securities Services Association. We might describe ISSA's members as the caretakers, custodians and standard setters of the world's securities business. Before ISSA, Colin was an MD in Operations at UBS. Colin shares his insights on where we are and where we are going. A few snippets: Cash is king. This echoes my very very podcast guest, Barry Lewis. Standardization, inter-operability, not just in name but rules, legal frameworks etc Thinking deeply about cash and the interaction of tokenized assets, tokenized cash and dematerialized assets and fiat cash is the key to reduce the complexity

Welcome to the latest edition of the podcast series: The Banker’s Plumber - Lessons Learned. What’s up in banking? What’s changing? What has gone wrong? What is going right? Today we take a different look at something I am calling the “consortium conundrum”. Banks want to and need to become more efficient; produce the same for less or more for the same. Digital assets and things DLT or distributed ledger offer a lot of promise. There is at least one easy explanation for the appeal of DLT; banks have to do a lot of collaborating in order to settle transactions, all that settlement stuff is expensive. DLT is a good collaboration tool, so let us financial services folk look what we can do with it. Working on collaboration is all about infrastructure, trying to reduce friction and fragmentation. Getting enough banks to march in the same direction is really hard, unless there is a deadline. Herding cats. What needs to be done, what works, what doesn’t? In the previous episodes, we have had expert input from James Maxfield, MD at Ascendant Strategy and Keith Bear of Cambridge University's Centre for Alternative Finance. Legacy financial services types if you will. Today, my guest is firmly from the world of today and matters FinTech. Tim Swanson is Head of Market Intelligence at Clearmatics in London and a long time commentator on the world of digital assets, crypto currencies and new forms of finance.

 My guest for this episode is the wonderful Keith Bear. Keith is an industry veteran who has seen and helped banks and their infrastructure evolve over a number of economic cycles. Keith Bear is an IBM alum and is now a Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the Cambridge Judge Business School. With his many years of experience Keith is well placed to talk about the challenges around driving change in financial services. He has coined the phrase: "The trouble with utilities" Takeaways from our chat: Although market convention & regulation drive our costs, there are plenty of functions in banks which are both undifferentiated and costly to operate, driving opportunities for sharing or mutualisation; post-trade & KYC are among them He shows where utility projects have worked and he talks about where things fail and why From his work at Cambridge, Keith highlights that in the DLT world that for those projects which are successful It takes some 24 months to move between a PoC and production 75% of them are founder-led, in other words, a central driving force rather a consortium of equals

Welcome to the latest edition of the podcast series: The Banker’s Plumber - Lessons Learned.  What’s up in banking? What’s changing? What has gone wrong? What is going right? Today, the focus on something I am calling the “consortium conundrum”. Banks want to and need to become more efficient; produce the same for less or more for the same. Some improvement steps they can take on their own. Only some though.  A very large part of the cost base for banks is driven by the need to collaborate with other market participants. Working on collaboration is all about infrastructure, trying to reduce friction and fragmentation. Getting enough banks to march in the same direction is really hard, unless there is a deadline. Herding cats. What needs to be done, what works, what doesn’t? To help explain the picture, I am delighted to have as a guest today James Maxfield, MD at Ascendant Strategy. James is a veteran of the operations side of wholesale banking. James is a frequent and thoughtful commentator on the future of banking.

Welcome to the latest episode. We'll talk about a recent blow up that was anything but cosmetic. Revlon, Citibank, payments in the hundreds of millions of dollars made in error. Those are the classic ingredients of an operational error. In days long passed, this type of thing might have been brushed under the carpet. Today, there is a requirement to capture these issues and review them. That discipline is called OpRisk aka Operational Risk. "The risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed processes, people and systems or from external events” To help us understand the world of OpRisk, I am delighted to have as my guest today a real expert on the topic, Andy Aschwanden. Andy has been thinking about process and the controls that go, or should go, with it, for many a year. We had the good fortune to work together for a number of years and having Andy’s mind at work on shaping process design in advance was a big plus. Andy is here in his own right, so any views he expresses are his own and not those of any employer past or present.

Building on the last episode, in which we focussed on the huge loss at the German payments process Wirecard, today, the focus on OpRisk aka Operational Risk. The risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed processes, people and systems or from external events. It would not be a stretch to say that in Financial Services this is a discipline that is really not well understood. Yet things going wrong has a huge impact on the banks. Operational Risk is something that in my opinion is poorly understood. In that misunderstanding I’d include both its actual cost and what drives it. To help explain the picture, I am delighted to have as a guest today Martin Liljeblad. Martin is currently based in New York. He moved there from Sweden a couple of years back. In Sweden he worked both inside a bank and before that for a regulator. Martin is here in his own right, so any views he expresses are his own and not those of his current employer or any prior ones. Martin makes some important points during our chat: His first point echoes a comment from my very first Podcast guess, Barry Lewis: you can't manage what you don't measure and you need a level of detail to turn data into actionable information OpRisk capital cost looks at the events of the last 10 years, so reducing your cost requires patience. But, Martin points out, any process improvements will immediately improve the experience for your customers As OpRisk matures as a discipline, Martin is encouraged as he sees operational risk input being pro-actively sought in helping shape new business ideas from the outset and when there are changes to existing processes

Welcome to this latest episode of The Bankers’ Plumber - Lessons Learned. In this episode, we will be talking about size. Size matters; it really does. Inspiration for the thoughts I’ll share today came from the collapse of Wirecard, the German payments processor. A sudden announcement that nearly 3 billion Euro had gone missing and the company declares bankruptcy. Sudden yes, surprise no. My view is that this a case study in what happens when you get the basics wrong. A word or two of thanks to the folks at TRG, the Realization Group, in London. They are a Financial Services & FinTech Marketing Agency who I have been working with for a couple of years, "Be visible, be found, be successful" is their tagline. Ok, today was about listening; that counts too. Colin Slight and team, your on-going support is really appreciated. What are the Lessons Learned here? Control. The basics matter. Evidence matters.Anybody who is tasked with verifying the items in the balance sheet, be they in internal control or audit function or be they external auditors, has to make sure they have irrefutable evidence directly from the source that confirms the balances. This applies whether they are assets or liabilities. It is worth a wider look beyond just the Wirecard issue. My great friend Ranjit Guptara recentlyposted a great commentary on LinkedInin which he asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who Is auditing the auditors?”. This followed an article in the Times of London which reported that the UK regulator of auditors, the Financial Reporting Council, found one in three audits to be substandard. Not good and not good enough. Size matters. Do you understand what is normal? Normal means what is typical in this situation. That will be based on currency, entity size and even time. A BlackRock money market fund that has $100 billion under management might just have cash at bank of 1%. Maybe. But, even then that money would be with a major bank or custodian and not with an escrow agent in Singapore. Lastly Short-selling is not a priori evil. It helps price discovery. All of these observations build on the comments that my very first podcast guest, Barry Lewis, made: You have to evidence that you are in control. A figure in a spreadsheet does not support a balance in the ledger – always demand to see the external proof that substantiates the balance. Cash is King. The correct money in the correct bank a/c is the end goal

It’s a great privilege to welcome two guests today both of whom I have worked closely with, in Zurich and New York and both of whom have mentored me over the years. Mike Certo and Eddie Watts served Goldman Sachs in Operations in both London and New York. They were exceptional talents of their day, something Goldman acknowledged when it included them in the very first cohort of senior managers to be designated Managing Directors, back in the mid ’90s. Mike, Eddie. Welcome and thank you so much for supporting my nascent efforts.  You have a wealth of history. Please tell us about the origins of the title “Lessons Learned” An afterthought: I was looking in the archives for material for the show and one very big Goldman mess of yesteryear came to mind, albeit not one that we ended up looking at together. I thought I’d share the humorous side of one of those messes. Years back Goldman was heavily involved with the financier and publisher Robert Maxwell. Goldman Sachs found itself very publicly involved in the affairs of Sir Robert Maxwell, or Cap’n Bob as he was known on Fleet Street. Then suddenly, Cap’n Bob was found dead, floating in the Mediterranean near his yacht. During an Operations Management call, one of the managers asked the partner in charge of Ops, Rick Adam, if there was any comment he would make on the incident. Rick, an ex Marine, was obviously constrained by the fact that lawyers were involved and things were all sub judice, but he offered the following comment: “There is little that I am allowed to say, however there one thing I want to make clear and that is that those who borrow money from the firm should either pay it back or learn to swim.” Priceless. You have been listening to the first in the podcast series, The Banker’s Plumber - Lessons Learned.