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Home2010January

Announcing BIS’ Workshop Series – 2010 edition

Month: January 2010

As one of our readers, you know our Workshop Series last year was a very well received initiative, the increasing number of participants from corporate and financial institutions speaking for itself.

We had three sessions in June, one in October and one in November, when we have approached the SEPA (Single Euro Payment Area) Initiative and the new European payment landscape; related themes were presented by our business experts and questions were answered.
The topics are more present than ever in the European financial market and they have developed, so we decided to continue the Workshop Series, starting February this year.

We might add, besides up-dates on SEPA Project and PSD provisions and implications, other interesting and ‘collateral’ subjects, such as the Bank – Corporate business over SWIFT channel, Anti Money Laundering, Workers Remittances, Cash Reporting, Exceptions and Investigations and… you name it.

We would very much appreciate your personal & professional contribution on the most interesting topics to be included in our planned workshops! Share with us your experience, your concerns and your questions.

We’ll make sure you’ll get answers!
See you in February!
(an invitation will be sent to each of you announcing the date and the agenda of the Workshop)

The planned workshops have one subject per month, you’ll be able to choose one of the two dates at your convenience:
February 2010 Thursday, 18th / Wednesday, 24th
March 2010 Thursday, 11th / Wednesday, 24th
April 2010 Thursday, 15th / Wednesday, 21st
May 2010 Thursday, 13th / Wednesday, 19th

We’ve been invited to stress opinions about Anti-Money Laundering solutions market.

Just a preview:
AML – Where is the driver?
Well, we think AML solutions’ main driver is the regulation. Of course the financial institutions should be the first to be concerned about their customers’ conduct & risks and they would like to use the same solution to answer to all related requirements, that is not only the anti money laundering provisions but also those related to applying international sanctions and risk management, accordingly. In the last years there were frequent changes to these regulations that in turn induced significant efforts to comply with from both commercial entities and solution providers.

AML – Which is the market ?
AML solutions are not addressing only banks and other financial institutions. The AML legal frame has to be applied also by other entities, legal or individuals within other fields of activity. Their needs for monitoring and reporting suspicious transactions could be different, from here arising the demand of having solutions tailored in order to meet customer requirements regarding operations and volumes.

Know, apply, work on it, have solutions!

Questions? Opinions?

(the whole interview is to be published in the Romanian e-Finance magazine, in an AML dedicated section)

Last year we attended a very interesting presentation at SPI conference. “Interesting” usually brings in mind some positive thoughts like “the presenter has an extensive experience and we’ve found some good advice in what he or she presented”. Well, this time it was a little different.

We knew from hear-say that the presenter’s company was quite successful at that time but with a high attrition rate and other staff problems and we were really curious to know why.
The first phrase stated that the success of a SPI Programme depends greatly on the people involved and on their commitment to the programme. Nothing new, we’d say that the success of any project depends greatly on the people involved and in their commitment.

So far so good. Ok, so how can one secure the commitment of the team?

We endured some slides offering all kind of formulas, such as
Motivation Potential Score = (Variety + Identity + Significance) / 3 x Autonomy x Feedback
Oh boy, maybe this is the rule and it is ok for many cases, but it’s a software development company we’re talking about. It’s about highly trained and extremely smart people and we wouldn’t even think of trying to jump to conclusions based on some curious statistics.

We won’t bother you with other similar ideas from that presentation – clearly taken from some smart books and applied “as-it is” to real life.
We will deal only with one quite dangerous practice explained largely in the presentation:

Project progress was reported at the team member level, and there were bonuses involved for each extra-success reported.

More people in the audience thought this to be a mistake. Software Development is team work.

Applying this practice will eventually induce an unwanted “bad internal competition”, each member rather focusing on their own job and their own good image , than on the performance of the whole team.

Not to mention that the individual report was quite detailed, so that each team member would waste quite lot of time just for reporting purposes.

Also a curious system of rewards and penalties was set in place to ensure that these reports were obtained as planned . For example, one could be the best programmer in the company but wouldn’t receive any incentive for lack of reporting progress as planned.
Other “great idea” was a black and white balls reward/ punish system for doing something good/ bad for the SPI project.

This is used with quite a success in some kindergartens in Bucharest and elsewhere. We wouldn’ t implement it in a high tech environment, especially in Romania (our sense of humor is so developed that this system would die of too much laugh).

Now we understand the high attrition rate and the staff problems. We have some difficulties to understand the company’s success. For how long, we wonder.

Andreea & Emilia, Business Information Systems

to be continued

Read the “SEPA, progress, challenges, opportunities”, organizer’s article covering The 3rd SEPA Conference, that includes our CEO’s vision on SEPA payments infrastructure implementation on the Romanian market.

e-Finance, January 2010

International Banking Systems/qPayIntegrator Suite
Payments Supplement/Q1 2010

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