THE JOURNEY OF the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has been heralded as the most significant legislation to affect the US banking industry since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The new regulatory regime will certainly leave a lasting impact on the US retail banking industry, although much of the detail will be left to the regulators to finalise.
Letter from the editor
The pace of change in today’s global retail banking industry continues to accelerate and nowhere is this more evident than in the regulatory space, as can be seen by the sweeping reform package of the US financial system that was recently signed into law by President Obama.
The case for breaking up Barclays
Growing political and commercial pressure may lead Barclays to consider spinning off both its investment and corporate banking operations and the Barclays Wealth division into a new company, leaving the remaining business as a predominantly pan-European and pan-African retail bank. Lafferty Retail Banking Insider assesses why Barclays might be about to embark on this bold change of direction.
Major surgery for Spain’s savings banks
A regulatory overhaul designed to bolster Spain’s troubled savings banks, or cajas de ahorros, which opens the door to private ownership, has been reportedly hailed as the most important reform of Spain’s banking system by the country’s Prime Minister. The Spanish government’s approval of the reform package will help to make the governance of the cajas more transparent and professional as the sector restructures.
Building a banking powerhouse
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) is focused on becoming a retail banking powerhouse in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This target was boosted by its recent agreement to acquire The Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) retail banking business in the UAE. Arup Mukhopadhyay, executive vice president and head of consumer banking at ADCB, speaks to Ronan McCaughey about the bank’s ambitions and the state of retail banking in the UAE.
Dealing with internal fraud
Fraud prevention in the global retail banking industry has typically been focused on preventing outsiders from stealing data, but now banks are facing up to a serious risk that is much closer to home: their employees. Jane Cooper examines the extent of this problem and ways that financial institutions can combat it
Finding a sustainable P2P model
Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending websites, which threaten the traditional intermediary role of retail banks, function as online ‘matchmaking’ sites between borrowers and lenders, and aim to offer better rates to consumers than they would otherwise find at mainstream financial institutions.
Databank
Benchmarking Europe G5 markets
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