Why is the South African banking industry regarded as one of the best in the world? How is it structured? How did it avoid collapse during the global financial crisis of 2007-2009? Bank Management in South Africa: A risk-based perspective is the first textbook for the South African market to answer these questions. It provides a comprehensive overview of the way banks and their financial risks are managed. The book is divided into five parts: Part One introduces the business of banking by discussing the evolution of financial intermediation theory; Part Two deals with the structure, history, performance and regulatory environment of the South African banking industry; Part Three considers how banks report and measure their performance; Part Four focuses on how banks identify, quantify and manage financial risks; Part Five deals with the management of the asset book, liability book and, importantly, the capital adequacy requirements set by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

Shaun Smith lives in a world very few of us ever see. It’s a world where the normal rules don’t apply, where people desperate for help reach out to someone who they know can deliver. Shaun does things simply. If someone owes you money and they are in the wrong then he is the person to talk to.

There’s never anything illegal, he may fly close to the wire but never under or over. It’s all legit.

The Debt Collector is the first instalment in the story of Shaun Smith’s life. Since Vice TV screened its fly-on-the-wall documentary on his life as a debt collector more than 22.5 million people around the world have tuned in to watch his exploits. For the first time The Debt Collector reveals the real Shaun Smith.

Yes, he’s Britain’s toughest debt collector but he’s a man with humour and courage, a man who loves his family and his friends, a man who just likes to see things done right.

Shaun’s lived his life one way: don’t take the proverbial, if you do then you’ll pay.

One of the worst recessions for the past 100 years, businesses failing, a revolution in technology, increasing financial constraints, compliance stifling the ability to be nimble, changing consumer behaviour, and a market driving products towards commoditization - this is the perfect storm facing the banking industry. Disruption provides a critical understanding of the impact of the current economic crisis and the current industrial revolution on financial services, the new trends in the sector, and the opportunities for banks to leverage their unique assets and pre-empt challengers from gaining meaningful market share. The book also provides top-level advice about transforming financial services organizations by finding the right balance between short-term requirements and the imperative of long-term change. This balancing act is what the authors call the "ambidextrous approach", which requires focus on two strategic initiatives: performance and innovation.

The Future and FinTech examines the fundamental financial technologies and its growing impact on the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sectors. With global investment amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020, the proliferation of FinTech has underpinned the direction payments, loans, wealth management, insurance, and cryptocurrencies are heading.This book presents FinTech from an industrial perspective in the context of architecture and its basic building blocks, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Cloud, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), and its connections to real-life applications at work. It provides a detailed guidance on how FinTech digitalizes business operations, improves productivity and efficiency, and optimizes resource management with the help of some new concepts, such as AIOps, MLOps and DevSecOps. Readers will also discover how FinTech Innovations connect BFSI to the rest of the world with growing interests in Open Banking, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and FinTech-as-a-Service (FaaS).To help readers understand how FinTech has unlocked numerous opportunities for tapping into the massive substantial group of customers, this book illustrates the massive changes already underway and provides insights into changes yet to come through practical examples and applications with illustrative figures and summary tables, making this book a handy quick reference for all things of FinTech.Related Link(s)

In May 2017, Alan Pickering won the award for the `Greatest Single Contribution to Occupational Pensions (1998-2017)' at the Professional Pensions UK Pension Awards. It was a well-received tribute to the role he had played for more than twenty years. The Pickering Report, commissioned by the Blair government, had been a blunt, brutally honest and pragmatic assessment of what needed to be done if Britain's leadership position in occupational pensions was to be maintained. In this biography, Paddy Briggs, who worked closely with the subject, focuses on the world of pensions and Pickering's leading role in it. But the story is broader and more human than the highly technical world of retirement benefits. Pickering is a baby boomer who grew up in modest circumstances in the City of York. As a child, he was diagnosed with a degenerative eyesight disease, and by his twenties he was totally blind. His disability became more of a spur to ambition and accomplishment than a restraint. This included athletic achievements such as running marathons and being a serious participant in competitive race walking. He has reached the highest levels in the world of financial services and also became a well-known racehorse owner and a vice-president of the Racehorse Owners Association.

Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money-- as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers.
YOUNG MONEY
Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
YOUNG MONEY is the inside story of this well-guarded world. Kevin Roose, "New York" magazine business writer and author of the critically acclaimed "The Unlikely Disciple," spent more than three years shadowing eight entry-level workers at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and other leading investment firms. Roose chronicled their triumphs and disappointments, their million-dollar trades and runaway Excel spreadsheets, and got an unprecedented (and unauthorized) glimpse of the financial world's initiation process.
Roose's young bankers are exposed to the exhausting workloads, huge bonuses, and recreational drugs that have always characterized Wall Street life. But they experience something new, too: an industry forever changed by the massive financial collapse of 2008. And as they get their Wall Street educations, they face hard questions about morality, prestige, and the value of their work.
YOUNG MONEY is more than an expose of excess; it's the story of how the financial crisis changed a generation-and remade Wall Street from the bottom up."

This book covers three topics that have dominated financial market regulation and supervision debates: digital finance, sustainable finance, and the Banking and Capital Markets Union. Within the first part, seven chapters will tackle specific questions arising in digital finance, including but not limited to artificial intelligence, tokenisation, and international regulatory cooperation in digital financial services. The second part addresses one of humanity's most pressing issues today: the climate crisis. The quest for sustainable finance is driven by political actors and a common understanding that climate change is a severe threat. As financial institutions are a cornerstone of human interaction, they are in the regulatory spotlight. The chapters explore sustainability in EU banking and insurance regulation, the interrelationship between systemic risk and sustainability, and the 'greening' of EU monetary policy. The third part analyses two projects that have led to huge structural changes in the European financial market architecture over the last decade: the European Banking Union and Capital Markets Union. This transformation has raised numerous legal questions that can only gradually be answered in all their intricacies. In four chapters, this book examines composite procedures, property rights of depositors in banking resolution, preemptive financing arrangements and the phenomenon of subsidiarisation in the context of Brexit. Of interest to academics, policymakers, practitioners, and students in the field of EU financial regulation, banking law, securities law, and regulatory law, this book offers a compilation of analyses on pressing banking and capital markets law problems.

This book provides both practice-oriented and academic insights into the disruptive power of fintech for the banking industry. It explores (1) whether and how the banking industry can use newly emerging technologies in the financial sphere to its advantage while managing any associated risks, (2) how these technologies affect traditional banking service formats as well as the pricing of these services, and (3) whether the emergence of fintech in the banking industry calls for a rethinking of existing banking regulations such as the Basel Accords as well as country-specific regulations. Prior publications in this area typically examine both current applications of fintech in the banking industry, as well as its future prospects, by analyzing actual cases or exploring the impact of a single emerging technology on the banking industry. They often ignore the interdependence between emerging technologies and overlook the connection between fintech as a whole and the future of the banking industry. This book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of various fintech applications and by analyzing what they mean for the future of banking. Given the potentially disruptive power of fintech, the book will focus on the challenges banking supervisors are likely to encounter as a result of fintech's continual ascent. It will thus encourage readers to think about and explore how to find a balance between the beneficial aspects of fintech and the challenges it creates in terms of supervision, regulation, and risk management.

This is the autobiographical story of David Freud's accidental career in the City and how, after a bruising 20 years, he emerged as one of the most successful investment bankers of his generation. This is the inside story of some of the most interesting and controversial mega-deals of the period. He stayed at the sharp end of the business through his 20 year stint - conducting transactions in no fewer than 19 countries. Written with pace, humour and insight David Freud's lively account of his work and life in the City is as accessible to interested outsiders as it to those who have work there.

Risk is the main source of uncertainty for investors, debtholders, corporate managers and other stakeholders. For all these actors, it is vital to focus on identifying and managing risk before making decisions. The success of their businesses depends on the relevance of their decisions and consequently, on their ability to manage and deal with the different types of risk. Accordingly, the main objective of this book is to promote scientific research in the different areas of risk management, aiming at being transversal and dealing with different aspects of risk management related to corporate finance as well as market finance. Thus, this book should provide useful insights for academics as well as professionals to better understand and assess the different types of risk.

The book explains the impact of bank business models on company business models by discussing the relationship among banks decision-making processes, sustainable values creation in company business models, and ESG risk. The monograph provides a combination of financial and management-related activities, in the context of bank business models, taking into account the concept of sustainability, and will be of particular interest to both in-house practitioners, giving them innovative knowledge about the models presented and used, and to students and young researchers. The project is financed within the framework of the program of the Minister of Science and Higher Education under the name "Regional Excellence Initiative" in the years 2019 - 2022; project number 001/RID/2018/19; the amount of financing PLN 10,684,000.00.

The Sustainable Development Goals introduced by the United Nations in 2016 call for the significant mobilisation of finance. However, although sustainable investments are steadily increasing, there still remain large gaps within financing and the information that financial markets rely on is often incomplete or incorrect. For instance, the financial system has been structured around short-term frameworks and goals while the most pressing environmental and social challenges are long-term. Prices do not convey the cost of externalities associated with social and environmental challenges. It is therefore important to implement the effective pricing of externalities and create a common language and taxonomy between investors, issuers and policy-makers in order to best serve sustainable development. Addressing this challenge, the authors delve deeper into the levers that can be pulled within the financial system to prompt an efficient ecosystem of sustainability-related information, allowing social and environmental externalities to be incorporated into the decision-making process of all market agents. Incentives needed for investors, issuers and intermediaries are proposed along with regulation that can trigger these incentives. This book offers a comprehensive collection of chapters which explore the ongoing evolution of the European regulatory framework, providing essential reading for policymakers, practitioners and researchers alike.

Microfinance is a renowned albeit controversial solution for giving financial access to the unbanked, even if micro-transactions increase costs, limiting outreach potential. The economic and financial sustainability of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) is a prerequisite for widening a potentially unlimited client base. Automation decreases costs, expanding the outreach potential, and improving transparency and efficiency. Technological solutions range from branchless mobile banking to geo-localization of customers, digital/social networking for group lending, blockchain validation, big data, and artificial intelligence, up to "MicroFinTech" - FinTech applications adapted to microfinance. Of interest to both scholars, students, and professors of financial technology and microfinance, this book examines these trendy solutions comprehensively, going beyond the existing literature and showing potential applications to the traditional sustainability versus outreach trade-off.

This book offers new insights and perspectives on the financial and banking sector in Europe with a special focus on Central and Southeastern European countries. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of primary sources and datasets, the book examines both the financial development and performance of the real sector of the economy and the impact and involvement of the banking sector. The contributions offer new insights into current financial innovations and discuss best practices in innovative financial solutions. They also highlight new perspectives in finance and analyze characteristic problems in the real and banking sectors in various European countries. The insights and financial solutions presented in this book will be of interest to scholars of finance and financial economics as well as practitioners in the financial industry and policy makers.

This book details the difference between the two rating industries, but this difference is converging all the time. The concept of investing in a more responsible and sustainable manner is drawing in some of the world's leading investors and, with it, regulations and policies are developing at the highest levels. However, the market is not getting what it needs to fully submit to the concept of responsible investing. It has called for more to be done from those tasked with injecting information into their processes, and two industries in particular have been identified as being natural partners. It has been suggested that they are on a collision course to serve the mainstream investor, and in this book, that collision course is contextualised, explained, presented, and finally its outcome predicted.

The cooperation and contamination between mathematicians, statisticians and econometricians working in actuarial sciences and finance is improving the research on these topics and producing numerous meaningful scientific results. This volume presents new ideas, in the form of four- to six-page papers, presented at the International Conference eMAF2020 - Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance. Due to the now sadly famous COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held remotely through the Zoom platform offered by the Department of Economics of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice on September 18, 22 and 25, 2020. eMAF2020 is the ninth edition of an international biennial series of scientific meetings, started in 2004 at the initiative of the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Salerno. The effectiveness of this idea has been proven by wide participation in all editions, which have been held in Salerno (2004, 2006, 2010 and 2014), Venice (2008, 2012 and 2020), Paris (2016) and Madrid (2018). This book covers a wide variety of subjects: artificial intelligence and machine learning in finance and insurance, behavioral finance, credit risk methods and models, dynamic optimization in finance, financial data analytics, forecasting dynamics of actuarial and financial phenomena, foreign exchange markets, insurance models, interest rate models, longevity risk, models and methods for financial time series analysis, multivariate techniques for financial markets analysis, pension systems, portfolio selection and management, real-world finance, risk analysis and management, trading systems, and others. This volume is a valuable resource for academics, PhD students, practitioners, professionals and researchers. Moreover, it is also of interest to other readers with quantitative background knowledge.

Financial markets are witnessing an unprecedented explosion in the availability of data, and the firms that survive will be able to leverage this information to increase their profit and expand their opportunities in a global world. Large firms must build their own datacenters to manage this data. In such an environment, the CIO s ability is crucial to lead an effective data strategy to capture, process, and connect data to all the relevant lines of business. At the core of this strategy lies the datacenter - the repository of all information. While there are books that discuss the mechanics, hardware and technicalities of datacenters, no book has yet made the connection between enterprise strategy and datacenter investment, design and management. Next Generation DataCenters in Financial Services is a solution driven book for management that demonstrates how to leverage technology to manage the seemingly infinite amount of data available today. Each chapter offers cutting-edge management and technology solutions to effectively manage data through datacenters.
Presents cutting-edge technology solutions not available in one place until now
Includes step-by-step instructions on how to implement a datacenter strategy based on the author s recent success with Wachovia s datacenter
Demonstrates how business and IT can be aligned in financial services"

The market for retirement financial advice has never been more important and yet more in flux. The long-term shift away from traditional defined benefit pensions toward defined contribution personal accounts requires all of us to be more sophisticated today than ever before. However, the landscape for financial advice is changing all over the world, with new rules and regulations transforming the financial advice profession. This volume explores the market for retirement financial advice, to explain what financial advisors do and how to measure performance and impact. Who are these professionals and what standards must they abide by? How do they make money and what are their incentives? How can one protect clients from bad advice, and what is good advice? Does advice alone effect changes in personal habits? Answering these questions, along with new technology that will decrease the delivery costs of advice, will play a transformative role in helping more households receive the quality financial advice that they need. Accordingly, this volume illuminates the market and regulatory challenges so as to enhance consumer, plan sponsor, and regulator decisions.