01 February 2005 Comments

 

Editorial Comment

Time starts to fly by as you get older, so it was a bit of a surprise to look back and see that I’ve been inhabiting this column for a year now.

Looking back at that first editorial column, I see that it was full of stuff about it being Spring and the first shoots of recovery happening any day now. A bad case of Seasonal Cliché Disorder that I’m not fully over, thank you for asking.

Well, it didn’t turn out to be that bad a year, compared to its predecessors, at least. Even the (thoroughly unreliable) Christmas Party Index was up, suggesting that there is some money around again.

That said, 2005 has got off to a reasonably active start across most of the financial services industry. Tower Group says that there is going to be an increase in IT spend, though it’s not so clear on where that’s going.

In retail and operations, it is clear that a lot of IT activity is still focussed on shifting non-core activities onto third-parties, with both Barclays and Lloyds TSB signing or extending outsourcing deals and the likes of Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro and CSFB trimming large numbers of staff.

At the other end of the scale, electronic trading of foreign exchange went through the roof, with some portals doubling their volumes on the back of increasing activity from the hedge funds, which are becoming ever more mainstream.

Overall, European harmonisation is still on the agenda for the clearing and settlement industry. While those wheels grind inexorably towards the deadlines imposed by authorities, the future ownership of the London Stock Exchange has brought clearing and settlement into a sharper focus for those in the securities markets who probably haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the merits of Frankfurt’s vertical clearing structure against London’s horizontal.

Considering these interactions, it might seem odd that this issue of Banking Technology is the first outing for a new structure that separates news and feature material into a number of primary categories — retail, wholesale, securities and capital markets, and risk IT — as well as the more general coverage that was already there. The thinking is that this new structure will allow us to add greater depth across the breadth of industry coverage that the magazine has had for the past 21 years.

In making these changes, it’s become clear that a crowbar would be needed to separate the elements of some issues, and people on different sides will argue about which angle should dominate — wholesale banking, as a category, is particularly problematic when you think about it.

If you have any thoughts on this, or any other aspect of the new design, please air them — the other thing about getting older is how thick-skinned you become.

David Bannister, Editor