A Bank for People Who Hate Banks

From Bloomberg Business –

“On a sweltering afternoon in July, Tom Blomfield emerges from Bank of England offices in the heart of the City of London and promptly sheds his suit jacket. Blomfield, the 29-year-old, bearded CEO of Mondo, a startup smartphone bank that’s applying to operate in the U.K., isn’t the suit-wearing type. He’s eager to get back to his Clerkenwell workspace for a beer to celebrate Mondo’s surmounting a big hurdle in its quest for a banking license.

Blomfield and his team have just spent two hours getting grilled by eight regulators from the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October issue. The officials quizzed them on how Mondo will attract customers and remain financially viable. After poring over Mondo’s 250-page submission, which included details of its capital and liquidity plans, the group pressed Blomfield on why he wanted to run a bank. “They said he didn’t look like a typical banker,” recalls Mondo Chairman Denise Kingsmill, who, as a member of the House of Lords and a former deputy chairman of the U.K.’s Competition Commission, added a touch of gravitas to the presentation.”

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BoE archives reveal little known lesson from the 1974 failure of Herstatt Bank

From Bank Underground –

“In June of 1974, a small German bank, Herstatt Bank, failed. While the bank itself was not large, its failure became synonymous with fx settlement risk, and its lessons served as the impetus for work over the subsequent three decades to implement real-time settlement systems now used the world over. Documents from the Bank of England’s Archive shed light on a lesser known aspect of Herstatt’s failure – the chain reaction it caused across financial centres as banks in different countries delayed settling their payments to each other. The lesson for policymakers today to grapple with is: when a bank fails, could we still expect surviving banks to delay making payments, with a potential chain reaction in the payment system?

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Undo... undo! The Bank of England is right to ban autocomplete emails

From The Guardian –

“Staff at Britain’s central bank will now have to type out the name of every single person they send an email to, after a blunder led to confidential plans being forwarded to the Guardian.”

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