Strategy

How did the personal trust business go from the natural home for the high-net-worth investor to a shrinking slice of the asset management pie? This drop in market share has taken place despite a number of built-in advantages, including a superior alignment to client interests compared to the largely commission-based, transaction-driven brokerage model, and it […]

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Shortly after Russia’s stealth invasion of Crimea, in which soldiers in unmarked uniforms seized the peninsula’s territory, the US announced sanctions against a number of Russian banks with ties to the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Visa and MasterCard announced in turn that they had stopped servicing these banks. This move, like the Russian invasion […]

The post Into the dustBIN appeared first on Will Trout.

“People want simple, transparent services with real-time customized pricing, and it has to be available on the move.” BBVA Group CEO Francisco Gonzalez, “Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die,” Financial Times online. It turns out BBVA Group CEO Francisco Gonzalez was tipping his hand when he wrote the above back in […]

The post Digital Convergence appeared first on Will Trout.

“We financed ourselves in an unstable way, we were too leveraged, the strategy wasn’t clearly focused on the things we were actually going to be good at, risk controls were poor, management process was a bit dysfunctional, and we were driven too much by profit expansion without thinking about the inputs.” Such is the description […]

The post Not Making It Happen appeared first on Will Trout.