"A Guide to SME Finance" is a brief guide to designing and implementing an SME finance program within a commercial bank or other financial institution, such as an NGO. This work covers the rationale behind SME finance - why it makes sense for a bank to enter this market sector, followed by a step-by-step approach to designing and implementing the program. Munro highlights the need to automate the lending process, and offers a lengthy description of how this can be accomplished. Examples of loan application, analysis, and approval forms and templates are included along with instructions for use. Additional formats are provided for loan officer goals and periodic reviews, portfolio and relationship profitability management, as well as a model credit score card to use as a 'sift' for loan applicants.

How do market participants construct stable markets? Why do crises that seem inevitable after-the-fact routinely take market participants by surprise? What forces trigger financial panics, and why does uncertainty lead to market volatility? How do economic elites respond to financial distress, and why are some regulatory interventions more effective than others? Social Finance: Shadow Banking during the Global Financial Crisis answers these questions by presenting a new, economic conventions-based model of financial crises. This model emerges from a theoretical synthesis of several intellectual traditions, including Keynesian epistemology, Hyman Minsky's asset market theory, economic sociology, and international relations theory. Social Finance uses this new paradigm to explain instability in the global shadow banking system during the global financial crisis. And it presents the results of interviews with some of the world's leading investors - who saw over $2 trillion in annual order flows and managed over $160 billion in assets - to provide first-hand accounts of markets in crisis. Written in accessible prose, Social Finance will appeal to a broad audience of academics, policymakers, and practitioners interested in understanding the drivers of financial stability in the twenty-first century.

This book focuses on several topical issues related to the operational risk management in bank: regulation, organisation and strategy. It analyses the connections between the different key-players involved in the operational risk process and the most relevant implications, both operational and strategic, arising from the implementation of the prudential framework.

This book discusses the most critical issues relating to the recovery of bad loans - a major problem that European banks urgently need to address and resolve. The book describes, in an innovative but also pragmatic way, the new approaches, techniques, and models for optimal management of non-performing loans (NPLs) and the maximization of their recovery value. Drawing on a rigorous academic background and the latest real-life experiences of major European banks, it details a novel means of dealing with NPLs based on velocity, the holistic use of tools and "accelerators", and the active management of collaterals. Also, there is a specific focus on the smart use of "big data" and on the development of "bad banks", at both the single bank and the system-wide level. Ultimately, credit workout is defined as a core capability for any competitive bank - and as a quite interesting business opportunity for independent, specialized "alpha" players.

This book analyses the raising of capital imposed by regulatory and supervisory constraints for the soundness and survival of banks in Europe, highlighting critical issues. Accordingly, the text examines the improvement of risk management and efficiency operated by individual banks as the main driver for reinforcing bank resilience and survival. The investigation is carried out essentially through study of risk management, efficiency, capital constraints, bank regulation and supervision in Europe, monetary policy and economic growth in Europe, capital raising in European banks, bank regulation and supervision in the USA, raising of capital or improvement of risk management and efficiency as the final issue. Raising capital by regulatory and supervisory constraints meets solvency requirements at a given time. In contrast, improving risk management and efficiency allows banks to create the best structural premises for reducing costs, increasing revenue and profits and capital level, contributing to the solvency and survival of banks.

This book presents a detailed account of Iceland's recovery from the tumultuous banking collapse that overturned its financial industry in 2008. Early chapters recount how Iceland's central bank was unable to follow the quantitative easing policies of the time to print money and save the banks, while serving the worlds smallest currency area. The book goes on to explore how the government exercised force majeure rights to implement emergency legislation aimed at preventing the "socialization of losses". Later chapters investigate how, eight years later, these policies have yielded renewed growth and reinvigorated liquidity streams for the financial system. The authors argue that Iceland, long-called the 'canary in the coal mine' of the developed world, offers important lessons for the future. This book will be useful to all readers interested in better understanding the unique history of Iceland's banking crisis and the phenomena of its recovery.

This book assesses the performance of banks in India over the past several decades, and discusses their current status after fifty years of nationalization. The performance of different categories of banks is evaluated by employing both the traditional ratio analysis and more sophisticated efficiency techniques. The book also explores the market conditions under which Indian banks operate. Going beyond a formal banking study, the book also investigates the causes of the widespread presence of informal credit in parallel to its formal banking counterpart. This approach makes it more comprehensive, unique and closer to the real world. After 50 years of nationalization, India's banking sector is at a crossroads, given the huge and unabated non-performing assets and talks of consolidation. This book, encompassing both the formal and the predominantly 'trust-based' informal credit system, provides essential insights for bankers and policymakers, which will be invaluable in their endeavours to implement meaningful changes. It may also spark new research in the fields of banking performance and efficiency analysis. Lastly, the book not only has significant implications for students of economics, banking, finance and management, but also offers an important resource to support training courses for banking personnel in India.

This book explores the Swedish experience of banking development, regulation and financial crisis from 1900 to 2015. It puts the experiences of the past in the context of today's debate on the future of banking, and argues that the experiences of the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007 warrants new understandings of the role of bank regulation. The book also analyses how shifts in bank regulations are usually part of more general policy shifts in society, which are in turn connected to both pragmatic and ideological considerations. In the case of Sweden the shift towards more extensive bank regulations after World War II was closely related to the development of the welfare state. Such shifts in policy and regulations are generally international, and the book also explores how the Swedish national policy has interacted with international developments.

As a result of the recent financial crisis, new ways of doing finance have developed, creating alternatives to the regular financial system. This book explores non-conventional banking and financing mechanisms in detail, with case studies and examples in which these alternative methods have succeeded.

This book introduces the fundamentals of retail credit risk management, provides a broad and applied investigation of the related modeling theory and methods, and explores the interconnections of risk management with other firm operations and industry regulation. The focus on retail (private individuals and small-medium enterprises) and the constant reference to the implications of the financial crisis for credit risk management, make the book distinctive.

Within an environment made difficult by the continuing economic crisis, the Italian model for crisis management and resolution has helped to avoid many difficulties faced by intermediaries across the globe. However, the Italian model for crisis management will be forced to adapt to the new EU Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive, which introduces a unified regime for such events in all EU countries. This book explores the various methods for crisis management employed in Italian finance. The authors discuss procedures used in the banking and insurance sectors, such as deposit guarantee schemes and alternative dispute resolution systems. They also explore the evolution of the administrative sanctioning systems, and the roles of tax rules and credit rating agencies in Italian finance. This book analyses the evolution of the various crisis management processes, and discusses potential goals and improvements within the context of recent measures suggested by the European Commission.

This is an edited collection of essential readings on Reserves Management and Sovereign Wealth Management, from the recent SAA conference organized by the Bank for International Settlements, the European Central Bank and the World Bank Treasury. It offers an exchange of views on technical and implemental issues of financial models.

As the decade of the 1980s draws to a close, international debt--and the role of international banks in solving the debt crisis--is considered by some to be the major problem facing the world's economies. This collection of essays, contributed by some of the nation's most respected thinkers, academics, policy advisors, and top ranking executives examines the world monetary system in terms of its institutions and mechanisms and their relationship to liquidity, exchange rates, credit creation, trade, and growth. Practicing professionals, academics, and all those interested in monetary theory will find this volume to be an excellent reference on questions of policy relating to international banking, world monetary system, and world economic growth in the late 1980s.

An interdisciplinary and global approach to the different roles and impact of gold on society and the global economy from the late 19th century to the modern day.
This book provides a historical analysis that integrates the different roles of gold--monetary, commodity, banking, industrial and cultural--with the multiple actors- central banks, mining groups, refineries, bullion houses and major banks - to provide an understanding of their particular interests and reciprocal influence on the global gold market from the late 19th century to the present day. Adopting an inter-disciplinary and global approach, it establishes an innovative and rich dialogue between different branches of the social sciences, including microeconomics, business history, sociology, political and economic history.
Coverage of the book will include a comprehensive overview of the many facets of the global gold market's organization, from the extraction of this precious metal to its consumption. Special attention is given to some of the major international gold markets, such as London, Hong Kong, and Zurich, and to the national and global regulations regarding the gold trade. The book studies both the legal and illegal circuits of gold, as well as their interrelation. Together, the contributions show the complex networks and actors involved in different phases of this commodity chain, from the main gold producers, such as South Africa; to the major European financial markets; and then to the traditional Arab and Asiatic hoarding centres.
This collection of essays, most of which utilise new archival resources, will be of great interest to students and researchers examining the role of this key element in monetary, financial, political and social history.

Across the world, HSBC likes to sell itself as 'the world's local bank', the friendly face of corporate and personal finance. And yet, a decade ago, the same bank was hit with a record US fine of $1.9 billion for facilitating money laundering for 'drug kingpins and rogue nations'. In pursuit of their goal of becoming the biggest bank in the world, between 2003 to 2010, HSBC allowed El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most notorious and murderous criminal organizations in the world, to turn its ill-gotten money into clean dollars and thereby grow one of the deadliest drugs empires the world has ever seen. Just how did 'the world's local bank' find itself enabling Mexico's leading drugs cartel, and the biggest drugs trafficking organization in the world, to launder cash through the bank's branch network and systems? How did a bank, which boasts 'we're committed to helping protect the world's financial system on which millions of people depend, by only doing business with customers who meet our high standards of transparency' come to facilitate Mexico's richest drug baron? And how did a bank that as recently as 2002 had been named 'one of the best-run organizations in the world' become so entwined with such a criminal, with one of the most barbaric groups of gangsters on the planet? Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story brilliantly told by writer, commentator and former editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst, that starts in Hong Kong and ranges across London, Washington, the Cayman Islands and Mexico, where HSBC saw the opportunity to become the largest bank in the world, and El Chapo seized the chance to fuel his murderous empire by laundering his drug proceeds through the bank. It brings together an extraordinary cast of politicians, bankers, drug dealers, FBI officers and whistle-blowers, and asks what price does greed have? Whose job is it to police global finance? And why did not a single person go to prison for facilitating the murderous expansion of a global drug empire? Are some corporations now so big as to be above the law?

The deregulation, increasing regionalization, and keen competition that have characterized the banking industry in recent years have made this a challenging period for bank managers and directors alike. Today, more than ever, directors need a readable, comprehensive reference, not only for their day-to-day responsibilities, but also to guide them through the unprecedented changes that are transforming the financial services industry. The information and insights in "The Bank Director's Handbook" enable board members to take the active, responsible role that promotes a bank's success.

This book presents empirical evidence that supports and facilitates a practical, integrated approach to how bank regulatory and selected macro-prudential tools interact with monetary policy to achieve price and financial stability. The empirical results contained in various chapters accompany in-depth historical analysis and counterfactual scenarios that enable proper policy evaluation and the interaction of bank regulatory, macro-prudential and monetary policy tools in South Africa. The presented evidence also identifies financial asset boom and bust episodes and the associated costly output losses. In addition, the authors explore the amplification of credit dynamics by commodity prices and sector credit re-allocation due to capital inflows shocks. The book's empirical analysis uses a wide range of statistical and econometric approaches on granular data and economic variables to derive policy implications and recommendations. This in-depth quantitative analysis includes determining inverse transmission of global liquidity, as well as the effects of capital flows, lending-rate margins, financial regulatory uncertainty, the National Credit Act, bank capital-adequacy ratios, bank loan loss provisions, loan-to-value ratios and repayment-to-income ratios on the macro-economy.

Central banks have a profound impact on financial markets, and investors struggle to keep informed about their complex policy decisions. Technological and financial developments have transformed the US Federal Reserve Bank from a financial black box into a vocal, increasingly transparent institution-and the result is such a wealth of textual data that clues to future policy decisions may be lost among the details. This book presents a solution to this problem by keeping track of those details. Schnidman and MacMillan demonstrate how the latest advances in automated text analysis, combined with the precision of domain expertise, are the keys to understanding how central banks move markets with their words. The authors outline a method to not only examine every piece of every central bank communication, but to do it in a way that is completely comprehensive and unbiased while quickly yielding hard, quantitative data that can be put to work in modern financial models.

Deposit insurance has risen rapidly over the last few years across the world. It was brought into renewed prominence with the reform of the system in the United States in the 1980s after the Savings and Loans crisis, and was accelerated by the rash of financial crises that have struck Europe, Asia and South America in recent years. The contributions to this volume strike a fascinating balance between the interest of regulators, the view of academics as to how the issues should be handled, and the interests of banks and their depositors.

Interchange fees have been the focal point for debate in the card industry, among competition authorities and policy makers, as well as in the economic literature on two-sided markets and on the regulation of market failures. This book offers insight into the economics of interchange fees. First, it explains the nature of two-sided markets/platforms/networks and elaborates on four-party schemes and on the rationale behind interchange fees according to Baxter's model and its later refinements. It also includes the debate about the optimum level of interchange fees and its determination ("tourist test"), and presents the original framework for assessing the impact of interchange fee regulatory reductions for the market participants: consumers, merchants, acquirers, issuers, and card organisations. The framework addresses three areas of concern in reference to the transmission channels of interchange fee reductions (pass-through) and the card scheme domain (triangle: payment organisation, issuer, acquirer). The book discusses the effects of regulatory interchange fee reductions in Australia, USA, Spain, and, most specifically, Poland. It will be of interest to policy makers, card and payments industry practitioners, academics, and students.

This book analyzes rapidly-growing world-class Spanish retail banks. It argues that their success is due to excellent management, clear-headed CEOs, the presence of a cluster of like-minded executives who complement each other and create a homogenous strategy pattern, and that IT systems and the regulatory environment have contributed greatly.

As competition increases, the relevance of banks and their share of the entire U.S. financial system is declining. Banks have moved from a majority to a minority position in the financial marketplace. The ultimate success or failure of banks will rest on their ability to relate meaningfully to the consuming public. Banking Redefined explores the major problems and challenges facing the banking industry and their impact on the bank franchise. Banking Redefined begins with a review of the major changes in the banking industry and how certain banks were able to expand their franchises to a SuperRegional level. It discusses risks these banks took in developing the opportunities that played major roles, and how they viewed certain situations - what some banks saw as a threat, others viewed as life saving. Banking Redefined provides an important review of in-depth commentary on the rise of the SuperRegionals, a new picture of this ever changing industry, possibilities of the future and how to make the transition, case studies of best and most notable SuperRegionals, and bank's changing franchises.

The topic of reputational crisis in the banking sector has received increasing attention from academics and practitioners. This book presents expert contributions that cover three main aspects: first, an extensive review of the literature on reputational risk in the banking sector aimed to identify the relationships between causes, effects, stakeholders, and key qualitative-quantitative variables involved during the reputational crisis of a bank; second, devising a conceptual framework for management of reputational crisis in banking, and finally, testing this framework with the results of an empirical analysis carried out by observing key variables of some known cases of reputational crisis relating to international banks and proposing case studies regarding the dynamic process of reputation management.

The banking industry extensively lobbied against Basel III and governments have been keen to delay its full implementation. Chorafas' latest book takes a well-rounded approach on Basel III's strengths and weaknesses and explains how, without deep restructuring of the global banking industry, (like Basel II) Basel III will fail.

Banks are entering a new environment. Regulation and supervision are becoming tougher, so that banks will be less likely to fail. If a bank does fail, bail-in rather than bail-out will be the new resolution regime, so that investors, not taxpayers, bear loss. Safe to Fail sums up the challenges that banks will face and how they can meet them.