Why bankers are intellectually naked

Kannu

Banking is going through one of its periodic gut wrenching rides. Every 10-20 years, there's a banking crisis somewhere in the world and then all hell breaks loose with demands to fix the banking system. They tinker around the edges and then things go along in the similar way. 

Couple of things. I visited the Bank of England museum over the holidays. And it's fascinating to see how that bank evolved. And the number of crises situations it went through. And is still going through. That's the nature of banking son. And that's because it's an intermediary between many stakeholders such as savers, corporates, funds, governments, etc etc. And they change. When they change, the role of banks needs to change as well. Sometimes things break. 

The second aspect to remember is that historically speaking, banking and money lending has always been in the cross fires going back to Jesus overturning the money lenders tables in the Jerusalem temple to how the banias in India and Jews worldwide were and still are spat upon because they do banking and money lending. Religions frown on it, Judaism Christianity and Islam frown on it and ban usury or any kind of interest rates in the case of Islam. 

And you know what? Life goes on and banking goes on. 

Fascinating. 

Love

Baba 

Saving...) (Saving...) Why bankers are intellectually naked - FT.com
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/39c38b74-715d-11e2-9b5c-00144feab49a.html#axzz2NsN8o3gj

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Why bankers are intellectually naked - FT.com

A definitive explanation of the industry’s economics warns the causes of the financial crisis have not gone away and will return

The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It, by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, Princeton, RRP£19.95, RRP$29.95

The UK’s Independent Commission on Banking, of which I was a member, made a modest proposal: the proportion of the balance sheet of UK retail banks that has to be funded by equity, instead of debt, should be raised to 4 per cent. This would be just a percentage point above the figure suggested by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The government rejected this, because of lobbying by the banks.

Why might even so tiny an increase in the equity-funded proportio

Updates

I realise that I haven't updated this blog for a long long time. So what’s been happening?

IT4CH

The IT4CH charity is trundling along fine. We are currently looking for a deputy to the CEO as well as some volunteers who can assist in getting more equipment into the warehouses that we have got scattered around the country. I think we found one person but she had to unfortunately duck out as she has to move away. Drats.

We met up with the head of SIFE in Nottingham and he has promised to work with us to see if we can improve the quality of computers we get, increase the number of donations we get, get some properties that we can store them in and also to see if we can enhance the training opportunities. Good start anyway. If this works out, then we can think about rolling this out nationally to other SIFE chapters who might be of assistance.

The Transformation Trust.

I met with Nicky Old, a very inspiring lady from The Transformation Trust. She got introduced to me via our mutual friend, Annie Natarajan. Nicky invited me earlier to the BT Tower where I took loads of pics. The Transformation Trust is doing a fantastic job with hundreds of schools around the country but they wanted to do something which can improve financial literacy amongst the schools. I immediately thought about seeing if we can use the Trading Game from LSE SIFE for this.

So anyway, that meeting happened between the Transformation Trust, LSE and SIFE and good steps were agreed. We have decided to check out the trading game to the London based schools that the Transformation Trust has links with. Then we can think about rolling this out. I fully expect that we will be able to touch 40-50 schools, which means about 2000 students at the minimum will be trained up on markets, how to trade, understand finance and economics, understand how to go to college and study, savings and investments. All in all, a very good step. Fairly chuffed with this step. If need be, i can help arrange for the presentations and discussions at work.

Home Start Hillingdon

We had a bit of a strategy session where a bit of head banging went on about how to do the funding over the next 3 years. Quite an interesting challenge we have here, to improve the position of the charity to cover for the funding gaps which have arisen due to the reduction of public sector funding. So I have been trying to get hold of various bits and bobs, like getting a friend of mine to agree to sponsor a web shop, need to figure out a way to get some funding to train our families / volunteers to create stuff so that we can sell, get some more sponsorship monies from people who might be willing to run / bike to raise some dosh. Got a whole list of tertiary items in track. So lets see how that works out. Its a long way to go and the funding cuts dont help at all.

Universities.

Had a nice session with the MBS chaps who popped over to work and i arranged to have 4 other MBS alumni who work in the bank to speak to a bunch of new chaps. Also got one of our MD’s to speak to them about life in general, she was brilliant, people loved her. We were also going to have another session with mentors and mentees but that fell through unfortunately. Oh! well.

I don't know if I talked about this or not but popped up to Colchester to talk about transformation to a bunch of public sector and SME owners. Am also going to do an introduction to their new MBA entries at the bank and also another talk in September to Essex alumni.

Mentees.

Couple of the mentees are trundling along. One lady got a new job, its not as good, but its a job, so now she can carry on the search for a new one. Another lady wants to get a better job so will introduce her to couple of my contacts in the information security world. I got some good contacts out of a dinner I attended at a CIO forum recently on identify and access control. So things are moving on.

Worries and troubles galore

I am racking my brains on how to raise more money for Home Start. Sustainable money, not something that we are taking off the public purse. I will be approaching the firm to see if some kind of regular funding can be arranged, but something more sustainable has to be established. I have also volunteered to be the photographer for various events where we can raise some dosh. Perhaps a calendar? lol, that should be interesting, but if we are not able to raise some serious thousands of pounds by end of the year, we will be in trouble.

On the other hand, as I had mentioned before. HSBC donated 1000 pieces of kit to the IT4CH charity. That put us in a tizzy. Usually we get smaller quantities of kit so we can turn it around in time and dispatch to various hospitals, but this is really nice of them. We can give some good surprises to quite a lot of hospitals around the country. But we have found some space and its now well settled down.

Incidentally, I finally managed to find the link to the competition submission that I had done for the Whittington Hospital. Here’s the link to the competition website. I like the idea, it links photography with philanthropy. Maybe I can do something like this for Home Start.

Other news, doing a fair bit of mentoring with some students and also trying to get some alumni work going with an old alma mater. God, its painful, like pushing jelly uphill. But we shall overcome and all that nice guff. I also went to Swansea Business School for an advisory board meeting. I will write more about some points which popped up there about the future of business education, but will blog it on my dailysalty site, not here, don't want to bore you guys.

I am also thinking about resigning from WCIT. I am not really sure that I am adding any value there, all the events take place during day time in the city and I just cannot get there.

This week’s update

Bit of a mixed bag this week. While one of the charities is going through some serious funding issues, that means that I as the interim treasurer is having to pour over financials and making the usual mess of it. Its so important in this day and age to make sure that your funding and your expenses are matched, otherwise we end up in severe trouble and then the basic existence of the charity itself is threatened. Specially the fact that your funding is very lumpy and not so certain while your outflow is smooth and very certain. The basic difference between your fixed and variable costs. Not good. The more I learn about this and the fascinating links with the public funding the more astonished I am.

On the SIFE front, went to hear the LSE team present to the business advisors. They did a fantastic job, I was so proud of what they have achieved, very professional and slick. I like!. My boys and girls, very nice. I do think they will do brilliantly at the national competition. We also need to print off their Annual Report. Will try to get a copy online.

On the IT4CH front, got the 1000 PC units from the bank, now the challenge is where to put them all, usually we get them in dribs and drabs, but now we got the full lot. So we need to worry about it a bit, but Pat is on the case.

This time when I am in India, I will try to pop into Disha to see how they are getting along. Long time no talk to them. I wonder how they are getting along. Ma and Baba are not getting a bit old to go check them out so have to go there myself.

Challenges galore with funding

As you might know, I have recently joined Home Start as a trustee and was asked to help out temporarily as a treasurer as well. This organisation with its local chapters helps out families in trouble, whether drugs, lack of jobs, immigration problems, domestic violence, mental disability, you name it. So the charity trains volunteers to go to these families and speaks to them. Helps to put in a plan to remediate the issue, whether getting a job or to get medical assistance or simply escape domestic violence.

Anyway, the entire Home Start organisation is in trouble. This is pretty much almost fully funded by the government, the central government and local council. And the charities, with their fairly high fixed costs, is really susceptible to funding cuts or even delays.

Here’s a good article on a similar charity (SureStart) and how the funding changes are impacting this charity. Quoting large chunks of it.

Daycare Trust research suggests up to 86% of centres are facing budget cuts and that up to 250 may close in 2011. But ministers say there is enough money in the system to retain the centres. They want to refocus the centres to help more disadvantaged families with health visitors picking up some of their early intervention work.Sure Start Children's Centres are being cut in some places because the grant which funds them was cut by 11% in the emergency budget, and again in the comprehensive spending review by almost the same percentage.

Then the government removed the protection from the Sure Start budget. This has left them vulnerable as councils sought to make up losses to their central government grants overall. As local authorities have set out their plans to reduce budgets local campaigns have sprung up from parents anxious about losing the services and help they offer to them and their children.

One of the reasons why I have joined is that I am firmly of the belief that we can switch this idea of funding for families in our neighbourhood from sucking on the government’s tit to getting money from local businesses and other families. We need to make things more efficient and make this sustainable. I am going to speak to the ex treasurer of another charity which has gone bankrupt to find out why they did so. Well, we know why they went bust, they ran out of money from the government and were not able to replace it with private or alternative funding.

by the way, if you know of anybody who wishes to be a trustee and lives in and around Harrow, Ruislip, Hillingdon, and has experience of managing organisations or public sector units, happy to hear from them. In particular, very happy to hear from people who have HR experience of any sort.

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In other news:

1. Sustainability news, I am working to introduce a system of getting some actual revenue raising ideas on the table from our chaps. Sustainable cost savings is all right and good but the real challenge is to find something that raises revenues. Now THAT is a good challenge for me : )

2. On the IT4CH front, we are getting more properties across the country to store IT equipment and we are looking to find a deputy for Pat, we need some assistance on a part time basis. I spoke at couple of dinners to raise money for the charity. The first one was on cloud computing and the second was on asset management. Just shows that people are willing to pay me for the nothing that I know about and just regurgitate, lol.

3. We are moving ahead on the books for schools idea in India, still in the formative stage, but the bank has a relationship with a local school where we are contributing some stuff. So introduced couple of people together and seems like its working, we might have a bit of a movement on it.

4. On the academic front, am hoping to engage couple of MBA students and get them working on couple of projects, they get a business project and we get some high quality research out of them

5. Also meeting another university’s academic business coordinator to see what we can do to improve the liaison between the firm and the university.

6. Am hoping to join a corporate sustainability organisation, i need to understand more about this malarkey. Lets see.

7. I am going to go next week to the LSE SIFE unit’s presentations on the national competitions, I hope they win, they are my boys and girls :)

Shambling around doing stuff

It is slowly picking up speed on the charity front after the slow down over the summer. So what have I been up to?

1. Well, had a nice session with the SIFE LSE team who were formed for the first time this academic year. The financial trading game is going on fine, the interaction with TeachFirst is good and should pick up speed. Then we had a long chat about potential environmental projects and a shed load of projects popped up during the discussions, ranging from helping ex-convicts to homeless people to ex-soldiers who want to get back into civilian life and and and. Anyway, the chaps have decided to go away and check out the options. Spoke to one of our COO’s and he has kindly offered to sponsor a good sustainability project that has a clear business case (revenue, costs or both). So this promises to be good fun.

2. Help for Hero’s, we had a good quiz night and managed to raise more than £2000 for this charity. Good stuff, I think i will do a bit more for these fellows, lets see, I have some ideas which are brewing away.

3. Meeting somebody for the 100books projects next week which unfortunately sort of got paused because the main pusher of the project had to move jobs. But hopefully we can resurrect it and make something of this. Watch this space.

4. The team from Nottingham University SIFE team have met with Pat Ryan, who is our CEO of the IT4CH charity. They are apparently quite happy and excited to join into the charity and and and. Quite happy with this.

5. Talking about IT4CH, after pimping myself, managed to raise a £1000 cheque for the charity, that should help. We have also got a great volunteer who is speaking to various IT firms in London who could be potential donors of equipment.

6. An interesting project popped up at work during a sustainability meeting, and that’s a proposal to reduce the grammage of our printing paper from 80gsm to 75gsm. This could aim to reduce costs, save 15-12 tons of paper consumption daily. So am sponsoring this at my business unit to see if it works, if the client facing chaps don't object and the printing works. Quite a good idea, eh?

7. Didnt mention this before, but hosted a team from Essex University who were interested in knowing what we are doing with our sustainability piece within the bank. Quite an interesting talk, got two MD’s in as well to speak. This is one of our biggest selling points to graduates who love to join us because we live and breathe sustainability. Its indeed part of the DNA. Have you checked out our sustainability activities and report?? We walk the walk and talk the talk

Charity Photographic competitions and other news on the charitable front

I am conscious that i haven't posted here for some time, it has been manically busy at work and then I left for holiday so wanted to drop a line on what I have been up to in the past month or so.

1. The IT4CH charity is now moving from up north down to London, it just makes it easier for our CEO and our team to do this from London.
2. We are also negotiating with several local authorities to lease their buildings for us to keep our spare equipment in, this promises to be of much use.
3. I put in some funding proposals for carbon change improvement products back in the firm, but dont think they got selected. Shame, next time I will do better :). Am trying to see if we can get some of this stuff formally pushed and funded in a separate matter
4. SIFE is powering up for this academic year, as usual, I will be at LSE but have also offered to help Essex out. As I mentioned before, i am considering doing something with them on the academic and research front and I thought it might be able to kill 2 birds with one stone.
5. The discussions with Manchester Business School proceed sporadically, I am specially happy about an internship/graduate recruitment proposal, lets see, early days yet.
6. And finally, am thinking about submitting my photo essay on the Whittington Hospital in North London to this photo competition. I realise what we do with the kids is not so visually attractive, perhaps Disha would have been better but its way out in India and dont know when I will be there next. I quote from the site:

PhotoPhilanthrophy believes in the power of photography to inspire hope and understanding and to connect people around the world. All subjects photographed should be treated with respect, compassion and dignity. PhotoPhilanthropy reserves the the right to reject any submission based on quality, content or theme. All submissions will be reviewed by the PhotoPhilanthropy team for accuracy of information. Written essays may be edited for clarity.

Submitted photos must depict the work of a charitable organization (designated by 501c3 in the US, or international equivalent) and be presented as a photo essay. All photographs in the essay must have been taken within the last 3 years. Photographers may enter two essays in the same year. An essay entered in a previous year of the competition may not be re-entered.

For all submissions, collaboration with the charitable organization will be verified.  For this reason it is mandatory to submit a contact name and email of the person you worked with at the organization.

Upon completion of review, accepted photo essays will be posted on the PhotoPhilanthropy website.

What do you think? do you think I have a shot at it with the photographs from the hospital? I realise the differences between the visual impact of a hospital in north London versus say a charity in a hauntingly beautiful but bloody poor place in say Nepal or hot/dry/dusty Sudan, but what the heck, all part of the learning, eh?

Photo Essay: An evening with a chocolatier

We were invited to a charity event to raise funds for VSO where a chocolatier would show us the art of making chocolate. Me being the original piggy wiggy, signed up post haste. Well, it's all for a great cause, no?

The chocolatier lady in question was brilliant, originally from France (yes, notice the T Shirt) she had training in the USA and on the continent. She is just brilliant. Did I mention she was brilliant? No? well, she was, her fascinating French American accent was just perfect. You can see small glasses of port in front of her. This is something we drank at the end to enjoy with the final chocolate taste of pure chocolate and Madeira Port wine, it was extraordinary, the combination was breathtaking. Put the chocolate in yout mouth, then leave for one minute.
The melting point of good chocolate is 35 degrees so it will slowly start melting in your mouth. Tilt your head back so that it starts to slowly move from the tongue down the back of your tongue and down your throat. At this time, take a sip of the port (or any other liqueur as you wish). The two flavours will mix. Hot diggity dog. Brilliant stuff. She did say that it's good that you don't smoke, because apparently smoking kills the taste buds. My taste buds belong to a donkey, so that ship has sailed.

Anyway, we were lead into a room which was quite tastefully decorated with orchids. She first gave a nice little overview. Chocolate consists of cocoa butter and cocoa powder. Adding milk makes it white and if not, then it's dark chocolate. Chocolate tastes seriously different depending upon where it is grown. Cuban chocolate has tobacco overtones, chocolate grown in Papua New Guinea has flowery overtones. Wow, I had no idea, I will have to check this out. Then she went on a bit of a rampage on Europe and its silly labelling laws for what is and what isn't chocolate. The fat/butter content is what makes the difference. English chocolates are not chocolates, they are sweet stuff, and that’s as far as she would go. So why are people using fat instead of cocoa butter?
Well, it turns out that cocoa butter is also used in cosmetics. And the best cocoa butter is used there as it's far more remunerative to plonk it into lipstick and other skin creams rather than use in chocolate. So cheaper chocolate is usually made out of animal or vegetable fats or both. So if you are a vegetarian, check the ingredients and she said that almost all fats have animal fats in there. I had an evil chuckle there.

 
There were eight plates on each table, each plate was numbered and had chocolate wafers, weighing about 10-15 grams each.

She made a game out of it. We had a sheet of paper each where a list of ingredients were listed on the right and then there were eight boxes. So the idea was that we pick up one, smell and sniff it – do a Count Snifferu on it. Then take a bite and taste. Flavours were primary and secondary. So we had to identify which flavours were mixed up.

These were some of the ingredients, cardamom, chilly, basil, lemon, garlic, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, lime, coconut, aniseed, rosemary, lemongrass, cinnamon, etc. Can you just imagine the smorgasbord of tastes and flavours?
So we had vanilla and coconut; nutmeg and cardamom; lavender and lemon; lime and ginger; aniseed and coffee. These were for the light and milk chocolate. Then came the dark chocolates. They contain 71% cocoa. Lemon and basil; raspberry and rosemary; orange and chilli. By this time, I was feeling queasy, too much chocolate, man. Not good for my tummy at all.
Did you know men and kids prefer white or vanilla chocolates, while women prefer dark and complex chocolates? I didn't know that. She said that is what she observes in her shop, but then I prefer dark chocolate. Maybe its my latent feminine tendencies coming out. HA!. Also, guess what? Out of the 40 odd people in the room, only two were men. Go figure.
 

After each taste, she would ask us to eat a cracker and then drink some water to cleanse the palate and make sure that there is no after effects of the chocolate lingering around in your mouth. It was a brilliant exercise and something that I recommend highly. Next stop for me would be to try to join a chocolate cooking class or something. But here’s a small piece of advice, take it easy, you can really ruin it if you barf after eating too much chocolate. As it so happens, the weekend after that, I got to see Chocolat again. I love this movie. I think chocolate is one of the bestest things in life, but not too much, gives one a tummy ache.

Progress this week

Well, Its been a very busy week at work, but at the same time, there was quite a lot of movement on the charity side. Here are the few updates:

1. We had a good initial meeting with my friend Christian who is now going to be the Director of MBA at Essex Business School and another colleague from the bank. We discussed various ways that we can link up with the educational opportunities in terms of course ratification, courses in risk and insurance, providing more training for our chaps, etc. These things take time, lets see how far this goes. We might end up going up to Essex, doing couple of lectures and then discussing this further.
2. Last week I mentioned about meeting up with a person from Manchester Business School. Couple of more people from MBS got in touch with me, I am quite excited to see what we can do with them but the timing sucks at the moment. Will need to pick this up in September, frantically busy at the moment with the august 2nd week workshop and then Baba/Ma arriving and and and. Also filled out a rather long and a bit clunky questionnaire from the President, University of Manchester. Seriously, guys, get some professional help on that.
3. IT4CH: Well, we now have this charity officially recognised as the charity for IT for the bank :), quite chuffed about this as well. This means that the supply of systems is now on a sustainable basis.
4. 200 laptops for schools. We got to meet another school and we will be donating 200 laptops to this school most probably on an annual basis going forward. Lets see how this works out.
5. 100Books. Got an email from Praveen Swami, the main karta dhartha for this charity in India which aims to provide 100 books to each government school. He is looking for volunteers in Delhi who can help out. So if you are based in Delhi and can help out, please do join the facebook page and offer help.
6. Finally, got in touch with this wonderful lady, Lyndsey Buchanan, via my friend, Annie Tennant (who is a total charity fiend in her own right). She is running a marathon to raise funds for the Bhopal Medical Appeal. Will hopefully meet her at Annie’s wedding and see what else can I do to help.
7. Oh! by the way, completely forgot, have joined up in a mentoring effort at the firm, hope to meet my first mentee in the next few weeks, lets see what comes up..

The influence of a teacher stops at eternity

You might recall that we are trying to improve the financial literacy of British children by an investment trading game that we run for school children. One of the ways we are thinking about expanding the scope is by training teachers to do this rather than rely on the LSE SIFE team.

So one of the things that the firm sponsors is TeachFirst. This is an initiative which tries to bring teachers into challenged secondary schools in the UK. The charity assists in helping top graduated become excellent teachers. Not too many, 5-600 teachers per year and the idea is to make a small but significant difference. So we had a nice little meeting with them, along with the LSE SIFE team, we discussed ways of getting the trading game packaged up and then given to the teachers, we discussed ways of getting a competition going and again, funding for this wouldn't be a major issue.

Also spoke to our internal brokerage about seeing if they could support us, but lets see where that goes.

I am quite chuffed about this all, if we can get these 5-600 teachers yearly to use the trading game and push it out to the students, hey, big impact :) Very happy.

News on the #charity front

Apologies for missing out the last week’s update, I have just moved off from my current project and am spinning up a giant new transformation programme which is making my hair hurt, eyes itch and toes curl. Nothing big or huge to report on the past two week’s progress but some little ones.

1. In last year’s SIFE competition, London School of Economics team, which I had the privilege to advice, won the rookie competition and the HSBC financial literacy prize. Very chuffed indeed. Very good work, girls.

2. The SIFE team and I are meeting TeachFirst on Monday. To see how we can get the trading game and our financial literacy mission into the teaching of these excellent high calibre teachers. If 800 of these excellent teachers annually pick up our game and we squirt this out to the schools, this will become brilliant and big.

3. Am also working on how to see this teacher pack business become global in nature, but very hush hush for now :)

4. Have also been thinking about old laptops. The fact that I found out that so many students are unable to study at home because they dont have pc’s (IN THIS internet DAY AND AGE!!!) is shocking. Or even at work, quite a lot of schools are disadvantaged in this. Do not have good equipment. So am working with our IT department to see if we can kick loose some 100-200 old laptops for one school as an experiment. We are going to go meet the school in 2 weeks time, so wait for that :)

5. I attended a charity fund raiser for VSO. Quite impressive. Getting more details on it. And it was a chocolate tasting event, so wait up for that essay.

Update on World Environment Day & fundraising for IT4CH

Well, it was World Environment Day on Friday and there were a ton of activities that the bank was involved in. Check out the list of organisations involved with the firm on the back of the T shirt which I had to wear. In the interests of saving resources, I had to wear a T shirt which was at least 4 sizes too small. Somebody described it as “clingy” and he was being kind.

Very conveniently, the graphic points to where I need to reduce as well.

 

Now that we have finished taking the p out of me, let me get to the meat of the matter. We managed to raise more than £500 pounds in contributions just from contributions from people. The idea was that if you dressed down, you get to pay £1, if you were still dressed in a suit, then you get to pay £2. Which was quite nice and interesting. People contributed much more frequently and we were quite chuffed. Other sites like Sheffield and Birmingham are also going to contribute via the virgin giving website so at the moment, we dont know the full amount.

Sometime in the next couple of months, we will get the CEO of the Charity and perhaps a hospital teacher to come into the firm, accept the actual donation from one of the senior managers who is the sponsor of this programme and perhaps even get the climate champions to visit one of the hospitals to see where the firm’s equipment is being utilised. The idea that our old PC’s are being recycled by people who are getting trained on PC repair and then given to kids was very well received. Quite a lot of ideas popped out from the climate champions who want to help the firm out even more. So excellent :)Very chuffed about this all. Good engagement with all.

SIFE Financial Literacy Awards

Over the past few months, I have been working as a business advisor to a newbie team from the London School of Economics who have developed a trading game for school kids. This is under the SIFE programme, or Students In Free Enterprise which is sponsored, besides other firms, by my firm as well. While the teams are basically off to do good things to encourage enterprise, my firm sponsors a prize for the best financial literacy programme. As it so happens, I volunteered to be a judge at the financial literacy programme judgement.

There were a total of about 16 odd teams who had applied, then the SIFE management did a first cut of them to bring them down to 11 and then another cut down to 5. These teams were then put forward to a group of bankers who were the judges. (I obviously recused myself from the LSE presentation)

I sat there and was listening to the students who have actually delivered a variety of programmes. Some examples:

1. Working with entrepreneurs and small firms in distress to improve their financial management of their businesses

2. Working with micro lending firms in Ghana, Philippines, India, Bangladesh etc. to improve their handling of their finances and that of their clients. A great example came of their work when the typhoon struck the Philippines and devastated one of the groups that the micro lender was helping. But because they had savings and some idea of cashflow management and assets, they could recover from the disaster and were back in business chop chop. Now that’s making a real difference.

3. Immigrants / asylum seekers and refugees who are waiting for processing are stuck in tower blocks, with nothing to do, cant do jobs, in damn near poverty levels. So this university teacher got together, gave them financial management teaching, helped them setup a baking and cooking business and the women have started to generate up to £100-200 per sale in profit. Small numbers, but great work. This will help regenerate the area, create a community around these women and are also creating an international cook book. Fascinating idea, eh?

4. Several projects related to teaching kids on how to setup their own businesses, such as creating jewellery out of recycled materials and then sell them at school fairs.

5. A team was training kids on demand and supply, how trading works and got them all excited about this.

6. Getting chemistry students to create drugs and then bring in Glaxo and Kings College London (my current alma mater) to assist in show how that drug can be commercialised. Now that’s a brilliant idea, no? take chemistry students from the technical to the business to the commercial. Now if that isn't going to encourage entrepreneurship and value addition, then what is?

This is all being done by students in the undergraduate degree courses. And they are doing stuff that adults are not. They have the passion, I loved to see the determination and happiness and dedication and enthusiasm shining from their eyes. Based on the back of a fag pack, just these 5 teams that I saw have made a difference, a real tangible difference to about 10k people around the world. Now that’s creditable.

Also I am very chuffed that the LSE team was recognised as the best team :), very happy for them, those boys and girls did very well, very impressed. Here are some stats from this report.

Through the HSBC Financial Literacy Programme, SIFE teams apply for grants ranging from $250 to $1000 to help fund projects of their own creation that stimulate economic opportunity by helping others develop the personal financial management skills necessary to achieve financial independence. 

• More than 1,506 grants awarded.
• 2,202 projects completed.
• 25,250 college students participated.
• HSBC contributed more than $3 million to SIFE and to support teams' efforts.
• In 2009, HSBC disbursed 287 grants to college teams.

All in all, I am very proud of these kids. They are doing something for their community. Not sitting back and just wasting time on beer or what have you. Making the world a better place. I speak to so many kids and students in my career. Very few actually have the gumption, courage and determination to succeed. Having a social or charitable conscience usually means that they are going to be good employees or great friends. And it is not difficult at all, its quite easy to help. So my plans are to see if we can help other universities and actually try to increase the coverage as well as the depth of offerings to actually reach out to more people (both here in the UK and in India)

Prove that you made a difference

 

In the last post on this topic, I talked about how we are looking to help the LSE SIFE Team identify whether or not they are actually making a difference. At end of the day, we need to make sure that we are actually providing information, training, documentation etc. within the trading game, so that the students are actually learning things. We cannot really subject them to an examination, but what we can do is to have them fill out a questionnaire. When we met, the team mentioned that their questionnaire wasn’t really helping. Either the students were marking all on the high side or not marking at all. So we offered the help of our communications expert to evaluate and validate their questionnaire.

We met three members of the team yesterday and had a good conversation. I was reminded of the fact that I have quite a similar conversations with every project. The basic question that we ask in project or change management is, ok, so you want to run this project, but what do you want to achieve? What do you think is “good” is? What we don’t want to do is to be Columbus, start off not knowing where we are going and on reaching not knowing where we are, on coming back not having an idea where we had been and we do this all on somebody else’s money. So, it’s important to know what we are going to measure and what we are going to deliver, otherwise how will we know that the project is successful? Show me the money. Talk is cheap, prove that you made a difference. Show that what you did actually did something.

In my experience, that is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks. Speaking with the project sponsor, it takes time to extricate what benefits are going to be seen? Are we talking about process efficiency or reduction in operational loss, or revenue benefits, or what? It’s vital to clearly identify the benefits that we will deliver. And frankly, it has to be short and sweet, not a full tome. In other words, your sponsor should be able to explain the benefits of the project in 2-3 top level sentences, in about the time it takes for the sponsor and her boss to take an elevator ride (hence elevator speech).

Same with the SIFE group, Hay, Katie and I discussed what they are trying to achieve and how they can measure it. We gave them ideas like, find out how many students want to go on to do a higher degree BEFORE they do the trading game and then ask them AFTER the game about: “How to use a control group to measure progress and performance if you don’t want to submit pre and post questionnaires to the same audience. How to have mini case studies, use cartoon characters, how to put questions like “I feel confident that I am….” “I know about xyz”, talk about 1-5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree) scaling versus a yes / no answer choice.”

We further discussed the HSBC competition, their presentation and preparation needed. There is so much to do! I look forward to meeting the full team of business advisors this Thursday and will report back then.

Late breaking news: there are definitely angels in the bank who look out for business advisors. An angel emailed me out of the blue with some brilliant suggestions and actual help which can further improve this project. More on that in the next post.

Go Trade Young Man!

The firm i work in is a sponsor of an international NGO called SIFE (see www.sife.org), which brings together business and university students to assist the students to learn how to make a difference to their communities through projects. This in turn provides them with valuable training on a variety of different ways ranging from teaching the basics of banking to understanding cashflows to revenue generation to economics. As part of this engagement, volunteers from firms become part of business advisory groups for particular projects and help guide/assist the students in achieving the objectives of their projects. Look at the website, these young chaps are actually making a huge difference.

Personally speaking, I have been involved with SIFE since 2008 and it has been a very exciting time. To sit there with the students and see their bright, passionate eyes light up when they talk about how they are making a difference is amazing. I have sat in meetings where I have had students helping a bunch of villagers in Ghana setup their own cooperative to weave baskets and sell them, training NEET youngsters how to improve their financial well being in Birmingham, teaching some long term unemployed how to explore additional opportunities for employment by using job search databases etc. in Swansea, etc. You know what makes me humble? It is to see these kids wanting to change the world, having a good design to do so, the determination to succeed and the confidence to actually deliver. We are helping them to become better managers and actually make a difference., something that actually makes me proud to work for HSBC.

As part of this exercise, I am on the business advisory group for the London School of Economics and Political Science. This kicked off in late November and I have been in touch with a very bright young man on email and finally managed to meet him and another colleague last week. This is a post about that conversation. The team conducts a stock and foreign exchange trading game for school students (usually 6^th Form) in London. Their objective is to familiarise the students with the logistics of trading, the basics of demand and supply, the stock market, the Foreign Exchange Market, etc. In the initial presentation, they said that they hoped that the school students would decide to go into higher university education, pick economics or business studies. All laudable objectives, but then I asked the two SIFE students, what’s in it for you? The answer I got back was “fun”.

Which is good, but I would have expected some more concrete outputs and benefits as an answer from the SIFE students but more about that later. I also inquired about their business plan. Now I have seen a presentation, but unfortunately, I hate presentations. Far too many times, presentations are used as documents and one can go animation / graphic crazy. If one is talking about a business plan or a project plan, a word document helps to clarify exactly what they are trying to achieve, show who are involved, timelines, budgets, measures of success, etc. etc.. We are going to work on putting a business plan together, so that it’s very clear on what this project will do and deliver. More importantly, this will become sustainable and when the next year’s LSE SIFE students come in, they can build on what has already been done rather than start from scratch.

But to go back to the success criteria, I delved a bit deeper into it. I asked them about how they are going to measure their success? What is in it for them? It has to be a measurable quantity, because you can’t manage what you cannot measure and if we are going to run a proper sustainable business, then clear metrics are important. I suggested that they might think about actual trading or run a fantasy trading game where one’s progress can be measured.

I specifically gave an example of an experiment that I am running with my son, who is now 14 years of age. I have been training and teaching him on the basics of stock market investments since he was 12. Every quarter he gets £100 to invest, I ask questions about his stock selection but I will never say no. Over the past 18 months or so, he has now invested a tidy sum. Till about the middle of last year, he was seriously in the red, but now he is up about 33%. Given that I have told him that this money that he is making will help his education and buy his first car (and presumably to impress girls…), you can see the motivation behind him being pretty clued up in trying to understand the intricacies of the UK market.

I am using First Direct as (FD) our broker; it is one of the cheapest to trade (a tenner per trade) and has a good set of analytical tools. The downside of using FD is that it does not allow you to trade US stocks, which is a shame. The students got quite excited about this and wanted to discuss it more. We talked about potentially giving prizes to the highest return earner per period (quarter, six monthly, yearly), perhaps linking with our First Direct colleagues to provide some help, etc. I am meeting them this week to take this to the next stage.

What I am quite excited about is that this project is educating more students to take responsibility for their own financial results. Higher education is obviously going to become more and more expensive. If they can be helped to start on a stock trading trajectory from their early days, with dividends reinvested, they would definitely go into and come out of higher education with less debt and better financial health than now.

What else can we tell them? What am I missing? If you had a 14-15 year old brother, sister, son or daughter, what can we do to help them as far as stock market trading is concerned? Any links? Remember that the actual project is being done by undergraduate LSE students who are in full time education, so we have to propose simple low impact solutions, nothing that will suck up major amounts of time, money or energy can work. Any ideas? Has anybody else across the world seen anything like this? Is there something concrete that the bank can do?

An angel comes to town

People see me coming and then hide from me. I am now turning into a giant bore for people who can assist in getting money or equipment for the charity. But does that stop me? Of course not, BD keeps on barrelling ahead with people despite them being totally so not interested.

It is not easy to get hold of equipment as I have alluded before, but I was at a corporate dinner and bumped into a friend who was previously the CTO of a very large universal bank. She gave birth to a lovely little baby and then has now rejoined the bank as their head of strategy and planning.

She was quite interested in the story and gave me the name of their hardware provider. This hardware provider takes care of the disposal of their assets. I met the lady concerned from their hardware provider and it became very clear that they have other commercial angles to this. She asked me if there was a chance of me getting them a contact at my bank, some sort of quid pro quo for her, so that if i get her some business then she can see if some equipment can be shaken loose. Needless to say, and I know pride is a bad thing in charity, I walked away. Not interested.

I thought that was the end of the story and gave it up as a learning experience. But to my surprise, my friend called me up out of the blue and said, I have 30 PC’s and laptops for you. I was near over the moon.

I think I have mentioned before how the recession is meaning that more and more children across the country are unable to afford PC’s and laptops, more and more children are falling ill. So Pat is constantly bombarded by requests for equipment and the pressure is going up and up. It is so tough to even talk to these students, teachers and hospitals. I dont know how Pat does it, really.

30 computers means that we will be able to help 30 students, 30 children who otherwise might not have been able to study, to work, to learn about Egypt or Greece, to understand algebra or check out the football scores online or create their websites or mash utilities. Makes me happy that few more bits of knowledge are being created in this world and few more smiles are going to come because an angel in the bank decided to help in getting these computers to the charity.

I know she does not want me to use her name, but all I can say again is, THANK YOU.