Episode Details

The Governance of FS as a whole affects all of our lives as we saw in 2008 let alone in many individual examples of FS/Fintech businesses failing and losing clients money. In our digital age virtually all of our money is digital and next to no-one sees a share certificate any more so all of our investments are digital. Thus what might appear to be a refined topic for a few is at the heart of all of our lives – money being used for roughly everything and savings equating to money saved for tomorrow.

As a result of this central role of money in economies, Boards in FS have always had to be – lets put this mildly – “rather more careful” than Boards of companies which if they fell over would “domino” not very far. Not only do many FS/Fintechs “take care of” clients money but money itself in the current financial model is created out of thin air by banks.

Add to these long standing issues the ever-increasing burden on Boards as a whole from the always metastasising Regulatory State, ever-greater minutiae in FS per se and the State using companies to enforce social agendas which even a decade ago would have seemed unlikely/bizarre and we have a very challenging cocktail.

Neil has 20 years expe4rience on Boards and Chairing sub-committees of FS and Fintech Boards and is thus well-placed to guide us through this labyrinth.

Topics discussed include:

• Scottish and Irish traditional folk music
• transitioning from classical piano to the accordion
• interesting anomalies re accordions – not least of which one has to fill in the bass part oneself
• musical insights into Scottish vs Irish music
• learning music as “play these notes” vs “play along with us”
• a lot of folk musicians cannot read music
• Neil’s career journey
• the long delay between Basel II and Boards getting with it
• the felt sense of FS Boards vs “normal” companies – cf FS and Sainsburys
• looking after other peoples money – fiduciary duty
• even if you are the equivalent of a corner shop in FS/Fintech you have to have as much governance as the equivalent of Sainsburys – which in retail obviously does not apply
• the need to cope with all that overhead when your Fintech is still very small
• Case Study of innovation/Fintech/regulation
• Banking Alchemy – a broken model of money (see eg LFP085, LFP197, LFP220 and LFP231) leads to a broken banking system which cannot be repaired by any governance as have discussed in many episodes
• a deep dive into unitary Boards vs sub-Committees of Boards
• what has driven this
• the strange situation re independent directors and sub committees where excess do most of the talking yet are technically no on the committee – “it is slightly absurd”
• the volume of “left-brain” stuff heaped upon FS/Fintech Boards absolutely swamps the Board meeting