PP009 - The Financial Supply Chain
Participants: Chris Skinner, Chairman of The Financial Services Club and founder of Balatro, Peter Scott of Sun Microsystems and Mike O’Hara of Voices in Business
Mike O’Hara: Hello and welcome to the Payments Podcast, brought to you by Voices in Business and sponsored by Sun Microsystems.
My name’s Mike O’Hara and if you’ve just discovered the Payments Podcast for the first time, then a special welcome to you. Today we’re talking about the financial supply chain, an increasingly competitive space, and we’ll be looking at how well placed banks are for success in this space, where’s the competition coming from and how are banks responding to those challenges? Joining us to discuss these issues today are as usual, Peter Scott, Head of the Global Banking Sector at Sun Microsystems, and Chris Skinner, a well known irreverent Commentator, Columnist, Blogger and Chairman of the Financial Services Club, who often states that his purpose in life is to poke fun at bankers, but I don’t know if we’ll be doing much of that today, Chris?
Chris Skinner: Maybe a little.
MOH: Maybe a little. Well, good morning to you gents.
Peter Scott: Good morning Mike.
CS: Morning.
PS: Right, well this is an interesting area and I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what the requirements of corporates are in the financial supply chain space? What are their needs, and then touch on maybe what are the things that are inhibiting the banks in being successful in satisfying those needs and requirements, and then finally, as we wind up getting into what are the banks actively doing right now and what could they be doing to actually improve their performance and more effectively address what the corporates really require? So first of all, why is this an area of growing importance for financial institutions and for corporates? What are your views, Chris?
Well, the financial supply chain has been on the radar of many of the banking community for about five years since Killen and Associates did a research report in the States on the subject, and came up with the idea that there’s 81 billion dollars that could be released in value if corporates address the supply chain issues that they have. Equally, the internet’s brought a bigger focus around supply chain overall, because of the fact that you’re now living in a globalised world of commerce and therefore people are recognising that there’s much more intricacy involved in smart sourcing and global structures than there ever used to be. There’s also a very interesting take on the physical supply chain that’s come through in the last 20 years as a result of container standards in shipping, which has meant that the physical supply chain is now standardised. You can move goods around the world in a standard sized container and the cheapness of moving those goods is now equivalent to what used to be moving goods just domestically 20 years ago. So, we live in a globalised world and then we’re sitting there saying, “Well, in that globalised world where you can move goods seamlessly in containers from China to America to London, why is it that we can’t do the same with money?” And money is actually quite a problem. As Heidi Miller said at Sibos the last time it was in America in 2004 “Why is it that it takes longer to move money from America to France than the guy can move his ship that he had brought?” And in the time it took he could have easily taken the money in his boat from New York to Nice and made the payments, faster than it would have taken for the bank do through their processes. So that’s raised a lot of concerns around, why is banking making it so difficult to move money around the world when we live in a globalised world?
I think it’s not just the moving of the money, it’s also the risk into mediation role that the banks used to have with the old documentary letters of credit, that business has been slowly declining over the years relative to the open account trade, where just the volume and the velocity of transactions has been increasing, and the greater transparency that exists between the different communities around the world has meant that they didn’t – hadn’t really seen the need for the banks to intermediate in the old traditional way.
That’s what’s made the banks heckles rise a little bit to say, “We need to do something about this,” because they’re recognising that over 80% of business is now an open account, and letters of credit, as you say, are diminishing in…
Relative.
…relative importance, as are bills of lading and other documentation because it’s moving to electronification, or trying to move in that direction, and corporates are just saying, “We need to have easier ways of doing business,” you know, if they find it easier to do things through bartering they will do things through bartering. So again, the Killen report came up with a figure of over 80% of business is now on open account, and banks are saying, “If that’s the case all we end up being is a settlement of payments at the end of the process rather than being involved in the process, which is where we can deliver the value and keep our role.” So they’re really stepping up and saying, “How do we maintain a strong capability in supporting corporate financial processes through that cycle?” And one of the questions within all of that is the difference between structuring finance versus operational finance, and I think it’s that operational finance piece that’s been undervalued and overlooked.
Yes, indeed. I think that there is a threat of – persistent threat of disintermediation and a lost opportunity that the banks have got in being re-able to intermediate themselves into the affairs of corporates and the transactional flows to offer additional services.
We’ve heard that for a long time, disintermediation. I mean, I’ve heard that in account aggregation and consumer finances “Oh, the banks will all be disintermediated” and it hasn’t happened. I think part of it is – because on the other side of this you’ve got to look at the corporates are doing and what they want, and to be honest I think an awful lot of corporates think of money and banking as a necessary evil, a little bit like in our personal lives we’re more willing to talk about out sex lives than our financial affairs. I think corporates feel the same way in some ways, so in the CFO’s view of the world and the CEO’s view of the world, they’re much more interested in getting another dollar off each product purchase price, so procurement’s very important and just don’t see that the financial supply chain is therefore the something they can do anything about because it’s what the banks do, isn’t it? So treasury and banking really doesn’t hit the boardroom agenda, whereas procurement and vendor supply does.
Does yes, the procurement people are really rule the roost in the corporate domain.
Yes, and I think that’s part of what the banks are really troubled by, is that if they are viewed as just being a necessary evil and end up being just at the back end of the process because the focus is on procurement and supply rather than on the financial supply chain, then the – yes, they do have that possibility of being squeezed out of the process.
Yes disintermediation is probably not the right way of describing it, it’s more that they’re being disconnected from areas where they could potentially offer more products and services, and particularly within the context of SEPA where margins on their ordinary standard payments business had been driven down to utility levels and into the dirt and down to zero. I mean, for some recent announcements made by people like Citi & Deutsche where some of the payments are actually being offered at zero, zero pricing. So they’re clearly looking to other areas where they can perhaps make some money is another potential driving force.
Yes SEPA’s also driven this focus on financial supply chain and really it’s – if you wanted to rename it rather than financial supply chain, it’s how the banks demonstrate their value, and particularly how do they demonstrate their value to the boardroom when the boardroom doesn’t see that they have a value. So the corporate CEO, CFO, the banks are really struggling to say, “This is why you need us. This is what we can do for you. This is how we’re going to help you. This is how we can give you more profitability,” and they aren’t necessarily getting into that conversation enough. SEPA’s driven them to say, “We have to do that because otherwise all we become is a commodity piece of processing, which is called payments and payments is now no margin. Because to be honest, payments is just moving digits in cyberspace and you can do that for free on the internet.
Yes, well we’re going to get into what are the inhibitors to the banks perhaps offering these services shortly. Moving onto what do we see as being the principle requirements of the users, what do corporates really want to see banks offer in the financial supply chain space and why?
What do corporate really want? I guess it’s easing the way in which you do procurement to pay. A bit like banks work on cost income ratios, so the business is – so it’s really how do you reduce cost and increase revenue, and anybody who can demonstrate that in a clear proposition is going to get business. That’s the way in which IT vendors work. I mean, my background is selling technology and the only way I sell technology is by demonstrating a clear bottom line benefit of cost reduction and at the same time a clear, if we could find it, uplift in income that you could prove, and the banks need to prove the same to corporates. Because that’s what corporates really, really want, that’s what any business wants, to show that they can give more shareholder value. So exactly the same drivers in the boardroom of the bank are the same drivers in the boardroom of their corporate clients and if they can clearly articulate, and if corporates can clearly see how the financial supply chain and the financial processes and the pieces within that from procurement to pay will enable them to release value in the business, to give more productivity to their people, to get more customer income, to get more customer revenue, to get ease of cost reduction with their vendor community, then corporates will listen, and I don’t think that’s the language that people are using.
I think the challenge is also that corporates have businesses which are associated with the movement of goods, so if you’re a steel manufacturer or you’re in the fashion business, your business is not about managing the financial supply chain. That’s not part of your core business what your core business is, is making sure the right goods are in the right retail outlets in order to meet a particular burst of fashion, and all of the financial stuff is kind of tertiary to the core business of the corporate.
Of course.
So they don’t perceive it as having the same level of value or are prepared necessarily to invest in it either.
Which goes back to it’s a necessary evil in that the oil of financing through the business is actually seen as something that just is there as a commodity; it’s a process that has to take place. The focus is actually on what are the products we’re manufacturing or the services that we’re delivering? How do we increase and leverage those services and products to our buying community, and how do we make it easier to deal with sourcing these goods and materials that we need to do that? I mean, I work as a one man band in part of my business world, which is the Balatro piece, and I have a bank account, but I don’t look at that bank account as something that I can do anything about. I just see that there’s fees and costs involved. I’ve no idea why they charge me those fees and costs. I have a business bank Manager (I’m an SME and, I guess, in that context more medium enterprise customer) who calls me once a year and says, “How you doing, Chris?” You know, if that’s the level of the bank involvement in my business, expand that exponentially by a matter of billions and get to the large General Motors and Fords and BMWs or British Airways, Virgins of this world, how are they being treated? Well I guess they’re being wooed and dined and wined at the level of Treasury Operations, are they really being involved in understanding what those businesses are all about? Or, and take it another way, is it just that you keep business because the business can’t be bothered doing anything about thinking what they can do with those financial operations, as in picking up a large corporate account, consolidating, rationalising and moving it to another bank is a hellishly complex process that no corporate really wants to get into. So, potentially businesses just keep their corporate accounts through osmosis anyway.
Yes, Mike and I were talking about this actually before you arrived in terms of what inhibits the banks and what are the challenges for them, and I think what you say is absolutely right, what the corporates really need is a bank instead of saying, “Well look, we’ve got these information services about cash, management, and we’ve got these payments services, we’ve got some of these risk intermediation products,” banks still tend to sell things at a product level instead of having a more consultative approach to a corporate’s end requirements of, how’s the business to be run better and what innovation and ideas can the banks actually bring that would actually help the corporates do that more effectively? And it might be offering credit to their supplier community so that the pricing that they get through their procurement cycle are at a lower level. But it takes creativity to do that, which is not necessarily something that the banks have in.
Well I kind of got an illumination on this from dealing with one of the banks recently. In this debate, the conversation we were having is around Real Time Nostro in particular context, and you and I have just talked earlier on about letters of credit and bills of lading and open account. Now to be honest, if you came to me as a business person and said, “I want to talk to you about MT messaging on Swift and the fact that we’ve got a trade services utility and the fact that you can get over Real Time Nostro cash management services using the capabilities of bills of lading, notices of credit automation.” I’d say, “What language, what planet are you from? I have no idea what you’re talking to me about.”
Zorb.
Yes, exactly, whereas if you came to me and said, “Do you know that you’ve got cash flowing through your business and at the end of the day we’ve got an information service here that will allow you to see exactly what cash you have in which Country, with which customers, what your exposures are, where you’re actually making money, where you’re bleeding and losing revenue because of the cash and the inefficiency of cash in your working capital, would that be of interest?” I’d probably say, “Well actually, yes, that sounds like a conversation I’ll have with you.”
Yes, that’s going to resonate.
But talk to me about “Real Time Nostro” or something, I mean go away.
Yes, I think there’s another issue here as well that we’ve talked about the degree to which corporates are engaging with banks to talk about these issues. I think there are some corporates, which are almost run as banks, the Paul Bernstein’s, the GE, who are actually running entities which are more almost like banks than they are like corporates in terms of their function within the organisation, and they will have the type of dialogue that you’re talking about in terms of using very specific functions and capabilities that banks offer. But most corporates just want to run their businesses better because they see that as being their core business.
Yes, but that’s why you see certain corporates always turn up at the supply chain events or the payments events that are in the markets. I mean, it’s quite interesting that there’s not that many supply chain events that bring corporates and banks together. There’s an awful lot of payments events. There’s cash and treasury conferences and exhibitions, and at those the corporates that turn up are exactly the people you said the people like the Paul Bernstein’s, the Tom Bushman’s, the Ikeas, the corporates that have a vested interest in running their financial operations internally as efficiently as possible. But there ain’t many of them out there and there aren’t that many that turn up at those events, and so you then have to question, well, what is it that corporates really want? Some really want to have financial efficiency and effectiveness and those are the ones that you see dialoguing and engaging with the banking community proactively and actively. But the majority have relegated this to being a cost centre service a bit like Human Resources that they don’t care that much about, and that’s something that won’t change because of a bank’s dialogue around supply chain. It’s going to only change when a corporate can see that working capital efficiency gives them shareholder value and again, there’s research that proves a 30% uplift in shareholder value for those corporates that have working capital efficiency. But to be able to compare those and make that absolutely dynamically clear to a CEO and a CFO is a language that again, I just do not see in the markets being presented to those CEOs and CFOs and until they are then I think they’ll just ignore it. But I’m always coming at these things from being a simpleton I speak English and I want banks, financial services to speak plain English and if you say to me, “Trade finance, trade services, Real Time Nostro, working capital even,” even working capital that’s – I can just about live with that last one, but the other ones, it just doesn’t speak to me; it doesn’t tell me what you’re talking about. You know, trade services, what is that? Tell me, I mean “trade services”, what is it?
I think it’s a bucket into which the banks put a whole series of processes which very few people inside the banks generally understand, relating to collections and LCs, documentary processes, because it’s not payments, that’s another bucket, and it’s not cash, that’s in another bucket. Trade services tends to be – it’s actually quite an interesting position that the banks are in because they’ve got an increasingly aging staff there of experts and I’m not sure that many people, younger people entering banks say, “Wow, I know where I’ll go to advance my career in the organisation, I’ll go to trade services”. Don’t think so.
Trade services – so trade services we think maybe is this big bucket of paper, all the old paper, rubbish that hung around in the financial supply chain and the physical supply chain is now thrown into trade services and so we can automate trade services. Well, so? I mean, I don’t deal with paper anymore. I work in the Internet. I use Facebook, I live in a world where I’m connecting with people globally and people in that global village can connect with me through emoticons pictures and graphics, because we don’t all speak English necessarily, but we can all understand pictures because pictures speak a thousand words. So, in that world of the consumer driving technology, the consumer driving business, the consumer being recognised as the all domineering technology automated society that we live in that’s “iPoderised”, or whatever the word would be, where the hell does trade services and all that paper bucket of rubbish that we used to deal with fit?
I don’t know. I mean, counter-intuitively I hear what you’re saying, but I mean you are right out there on the leading edge. I mean, you’re a real tech adopter, a hi-tech adopter and an early adopter at that. I think that one of the things that you can make a mistake on is that some institutions make a lot of money out of the inefficient paper processes that are out there today because they put in a lot of image based systems and everything else and they squeeze a lot of cash out of that business. So it might be very, very inefficient and everything else, but the reality, as we all know…
Okay, so I’m a…
…banks live in the inefficiencies.
…I will create a cheque processing outsourcing operation, how many years am I going to be successful in cheque processing, even in the United States I now have electronic cheques, Cheque 21, but cheque processing yes, you’ll have a good business for about five years maybe.
80% of all cheque use age in the world is in the United States, very bizarrely.
And a fair amount in France. But what I’m getting to here is, and this is fundamental to this trade services and supply chain discussion, is that if it took so long for containers to take off in shipping, it took about 30 years before the container became a standard and it was only when the people saw the efficiency in the Vietnam War that it became a standard of movements of physical goods, to source that and service that war. If it took 30 years for the internet to take off from its first inception to actually becoming something that we all use, that’s the world that we all still in banks and corporates and vendor community I think believe we live in. Whereas if you look at the world we actually do live in, I went into a High Street electronics chain, and I always use this story because it’s still rings bells with me, to buy an iPod or a MP3 player in fact, in 2003, and the shop assistant said to me, “We used to sell them. We don’t sell those anymore because who the hell wants to download music off the internet?” In April 2007 iPod sold its 100,000,000th iPod, and the Queen and George W Bush use one, probably loaded by their children or something with their favourite music. All I’m saying is if it took four years for that turnaround, we live in a technology assimilating society and world that’s globalised; get real.
I think that’s true, but I think there are also some inhibiting factors in here which it’s easy to understate. I mean, I know from my Bolero experience, searing as it was, that a belief that it’s possible for large and especially medium sized companies to be able to automate their processes quickly is – it’s not reality. I mean, the point is it’s – the SAPs and the Oracles may adapt to standards quickly, but some of the smaller applications which are used by some of the supplier community out in Asia, are they going to adopt the standards quickly? If you’re going to have full end to end electronic communication, and we’re talking about business communication as distinct from web based communication, so applications driving transactions, it takes longer for that process of assimilation and adoption of standards to actually take place. That would apparently appear to be the case; it’s true even within SEPA as well in a way it’s due to…
Balderdash and bunkim, complete balderdash and bunkum, Mr Scott…
Oh, okay.
…and the reason why I’m going to say that is because…
I knew he was going to be contentious!
…[laughs] is because, I’ll give you three examples in response to that, one is obviously PayPal, because the banks couldn’t see how to do online payments, PayPal came along and became predominant, and within eight years has become the de facto standard for online payments, whether we like it or not and banks often say, “Well, maybe we should have done that?” But they didn’t think that it was important or that it was doable.
Absolutely, totally agree with you, yes.
A second is the fact that if someone came in today and like PayPal did, looked at the corporate supply chain processes and said, “Why don’t we create a PayPal for the financial supply chain that uses 21st century capabilities rather than the legacy infrastructures and what’s there today?” I’m not saying they’ll be successful, but I think they’d find that they would do it in a completely different way to the way we think about it or the way that we’re doing it today. And thirdly, and this is the final piece, as I remember being involved in a thing called “business process re-engineering” when it first came round in the early 1990s, and I was doing a project where we were looking at Lloyds of London and the insurance processes, and one of the things that happened with this paper document movement through Lloyds of London, is it went onto a certain desk, sat there for a day, then got picked up and moved to the next desk. But the desk was empty, no one was sat at that desk; it was a desk that was not used. So I said, “Well why does the document move to that desk?” They said, “Well that’s the French desk.” I said, “The French desk?” They said, “Yes, any exposures to risk involved in overseas, in particular French operations are checked at that desk.” I said, “So why does the document move there?” They said, “Because it’s a French desk.” I said, “Well but no one sits there?” I said, “We don’t have any French operation anymore,” and it was just like this thing where no-one had thought about, well because we don’t do that anymore we don’t need that part of the process anymore. But no-one bothered to sweep away the cobwebs to have a look until they did their business process re-engineering, and so I think a mixture of BPR, 21st century technology, a new player like a PayPal for corporates come into play and the banks will be sitting there saying, “Jeez, why didn’t we do this?”
But is the issue’s not – I mean, Mike and I were just talking about this earlier; we were talking about the banks’ ability to innovate and the way that services are actually evolving. What we’re finding is, is that new communities are developing amongst users, whether it’s PayPal or whether it’s Facebook or whatever it is and people are now building, if you like, financial services…
And building applications around those as well….
…and building applications around those new communities. So banks traditionally, in the old days they would come up with a list of products and services and then they’d push them out into the community, into their user base. What’s the challenge now I think for financial institutions is they need to find ways of wrapping their products and services in a consistent way, with agreed standards probably across the banking community, because it’s difficult to do as individual banks, but build those services around some of the new communities that are emerging. I think one of the things that didn’t happen, which we saw at the tale end of the 90s, was a lot of these pure play market places, meetchina.com, and some of them are still in existence, but some of them specifically dealt with vertical markets, and it was around those that we envisaged that we would have been able – banks would have been able to build new infrastructures. That hasn’t happened, I think in the way that was originally foreseen.
No and – but what you’ve pointed to…
But that’s a way that you could actually do it and achieve some degree of standardisation. My point is is that if you’re relying upon corporates within the wider domain, adopting standards within their accounting packages in order to communicate with their counterparties and in the physical trade cycle in ways that banks can easily connect to, that’s quite difficult because the standards are quite different, and the workflow even is sometimes different within different industries.
But you’ve mixed a number of things in there, and I guess on the one hand you’ve got much more collaborative capabilities, through technology today than we ever had before to do global dynamic changes and building new services and offerings dynamically in a global collaborative community like Wikipedia does, like the Mashups do. The second piece that you’re then alluding to is there are banks that are at the forefront of this and they are doing things. There are specifically certain banks that you could point to that are doing things, and I’ll give the example only because I think it’s the best example of something that has shaken up the market in the last year from a banking community perspective is Citigroup, and it’s not saying that I’m endorsing City, but the City, Vodafone remittances programme that was launched this year is completely disrupting the model of Western Union, using mobile phones to make low cost remittance payments across boarder is for economic migrants, a huge bonus because they nearly everyone has a mobile phone these days or has access to one, and the cost is at a tenth or a hundredth in some cases of the cost of moving money with the Western Union.
I think Citigroup announced – it was only yesterday or the day before - that there’s a zero cost for Polish remittances, zero based pricing.
So the question you then come down to is saying, “There will be certain banks that will move very rapidly to leverage their capabilities in this space and there will be certain new entrants that maybe that will collaborate with them or will be coming into the space with them to play into the financial supply chain value add services to a corporate community in a business language that can be understand by the CEO and the CFO, and the rest will be left behind.
I’d like your comments perhaps on some of the banks, JPMorgan Chase recently acquired Vastera, Citigroup of course who’ve got similar infrastructure, which they’re still leveraging. Should we be looking to see more of this, banks acquiring some of these financial supply chain companies? I think there’s going to be more of that, but do you think that’s a way that banks can improve their services effectively?
I think some banks will invest heavily in that space because they’re saying, “We need to get into an end to end procurement to pay offer, that enables the ease and flow of finances within the physical supply chain,” and that means globalised platform capability such that a corporate, if they wanted to, could have a single bank account relationship worldwide to run their business, if that’s what they wanted. Few will because they’ll want to have some form of hedging to make sure that if one goes wrong the other one can be accountable or moved to the other one. But that’s where we’re going to move to and to achieve that end to end cycle of procurement to pay, some banks will start acquiring the pieces that they’re missing internally in that process, others will in-house develop and…
And perhaps use the TSU, the SWIFT TSU, as well as another piece in the puzzle?
Yes, and I think between those two approaches you – a little bit like in the broker dealer markets when an awful lot of the broker dealers are buying execution management system software houses today, you’ll see exactly the same as you’re alluding to in the financial supply chain.
Right, yes, I think one of the other challenges that they’ve got is not just acquiring the software technology or the capabilities but also the people to execute on this stuff. So moving away from people who view bank services as products that can be sold to people who can perhaps go in and consult more openly on how corporates should be better running their business and to…
Yes, and a little bit like (tongue in cheek again) I’ve said quite often that people like Richard Branson and Michael Dell and Bloomberg should sit on the board of SWIFT these days, bring in the corporates, get them on board. That we’ll see more and more this involvement of the corporate community in the banking community, if we really want to get into that space and vice versa. And it really comes down to it doesn’t mean that you bring lots of corporates in as non-exec Directors to your bank, although I suspect many will and many already have, but you’ll see much more dialogue to try and get the Senior Bank Relationship Manager to their large corporate customers speaking the language of that corporate, not just from understanding their business end to end, but being able to talk to the CEO in a language of how to finance that business end to end in a very simple business dialogue.
Yes, it will be interesting to see whether or not SWIFT moves or we start seeing some move towards a sub-governance structure within SWIFT in which corporates can actually participate and have some sort of voice as to how they would like to see services from banks and under pinned by perhaps SWIFT capabilities evolve over time.
Yes, and I’ve had some of those conversations with some SWIFT people or people who work for SWIFT rather, and what I found is that the view is the only people who will ever have any governance input to SWIFT are banks and people with bank businesses with banking licenses. What that then says is business with banking licenses…
So that’s PayPal then?
…businesses with banking licenses, Walmart for a long time now there’s been this view that Tesco, for example, and Sainsbury over here in the UK only offer banking services by working with a bank ‘cause they can’t get a banking licence. So, do we get to the stage where a lot more of these businesses start buying banks?
Well, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? I mean PayPal’s acquired a bank in Luxemburg; interestingly this Payforit Service. I mean, we were talking about – you and I have talked earlier about the way that the mobile telephony operators are – well they’re only in the small value transactions for ringtones and games, not any more they’re sort of moving up the value chain into higher value remote payments, and you begin to wonder well will they perhaps become – take on financial services and acquire banks as well?
And I guess concluding that sort of point to an extent, ten years ago I remember Bill Gates described banks as dinosaurs and everyone said Microsoft’s going to open a bank, but they haven’t, and I don’t think they ever will because it’s not in their interest, and equally ten years ago Tesco described banks as clowns, but they haven’t bought a bank, and I’m not sure that they will either, but it is an area that between disintermediations we discussed earlier and businesses getting banking licenses, they are two conversations that I had ten years ago; we’re still having them today, we still haven’t seen that happen, but there’s no reason why it won’t.
No, interesting.
Now Chris, you’ve recently had a book published that’s relevant to all of this, I believe?
There’s two books in fact.
Two books.
One is The Future of Banking in a Globalised World, which is from my own fair typing hand, and the other is The Future of investing in Europe after MiFID, which is written by over 20 key protagonists in the market, including people from the European Commission, MiFID Connect, the MiFID Joint Working Group and many others, with a glowing endorsement from Michel Folger from the FSA.
Fantastic and we’ll put links to those in the show notes on the website. And we’d be very interested actually to hear comments back from listeners because we’ve covered a lot of ground in this conversation today and there’s been some interesting issues raised and some interesting points made, but we’d be very interested to hear what our listeners think about some of these things.
Now there is on the Payments Podcast Website, which is at www.paymentspodcast.com an area where you can make comments right there on the site, or you can send an email, if you like to, mike@paymentspodcast.com and we will include those comments on the site.
And I guess a final piece, which is worth referencing, is that the Financial Services Club has just launched the Supply Chain Forum. The first meeting’s on the 20th September, second one’s on the 18th October, third meeting’s on the 22nd of November, and Eric Sepkes is the Chair of that group.
Now those are in London, Chris?
They’re all in London. Yes, you should say that, and Eric you know is someone who is quite active in the markets to wind us up, which is why he’s a good partner for me, and so everyone’s welcome to attend those, if they’re in London those dates.
Great.
Very good. Okay, well we’ll put the link into your site on the Payments Podcast site as well.
Absolutely, now if you’d like to subscribe to the Payments Podcast so that you automatically pick up future episodes of the series, you can do that direct from the site by clicking on the subscribe button, which will link you into Google Reader or whatever RSS Reader you use, or you can subscribe via iTunes by just going into iTunes and doing a search on the Payments Podcast. The final way, probably the easiest way for many of our listeners would be to just send an email to me, that’s mike@paymentspodcast.com with the word subscribe in the title. And we’ve recently started a Facebook Group as well, we were talking about Facebook earlier, but if any of our listeners are on Facebook you can go along to the Voices In Business Group where you’ll again, automatically be kept updated of any Podcasts that we put out on the topic.
And the Financial Services Club are on Facebook too.
Indeed, and we’ll keep you updated of those too. So gentlemen, thank you very, it’s been a very interesting discussion today.
Good, well thank you, Mike.
And we’ll speak to you again next time, thank you.
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