I was talking to Hugh of Gaping Void on the phone the other day, just catching up and chewing the fat, also because he will be coming out to LIFT again, so it will be good to see him. I said I had not been writing much in the blog recently as a website that consists of ten entries in a row going "God, I am busy." is not very interesting reading.
But, God, I have been busy. I am currently in crunch discussions with a German, French, and Dutch banks, which has let to me flying hither and thither in Europe trying to keep up with it all. Interesting times. I think that the banks are finally beginning to wake up the consequences of the legislation for IFRS and Basel II, and that it has made the typical "build crap on crap, and manage the result in Excel," more or less impossible. The issue is that re-architecting the bank to make up for the inherent deficiencies in the underlying historic issues is going to be long and painful.
I have written about the emotional element of this before, something that I got from Mrs Spaceship, who is a psychiatrist, albeit on a couple of years sabbatical at the moment.
What I am seeing now is the last crunch of the Basel II preparations, and a re-examination of the implementations of IFRS, as the banks try and figure out how they are going to turn the short term kludges that they used to be compliant, into something that they can live with long term... Only problm is, is that this is a huge project, and no-one in a corporate environment that is measured in quarters by the market, in terms of three years in terms of internal career progression, and in terms of five years between acquisition and take-overs wants to be in charge of a ten year transformation effort.
But those banks that manage this change will be the winners.
Comments