Towards the end of 2011 Z/Yen decided to strengthen its international presence by establishing a Swiss office in Geneva. Switzerland is not a new territory to Z/Yen – having worked with several Swiss-based clients over the years, mostly in the financial services and NGO sectors. The ideal choice for Z/Yen’s Swiss office, Geneva is:
- one of the top 15 global financial centres in the world according to GFCI 10,
- an international city with many UN Agencies, international NGOs and other International Organisations,
- home to Chiara von Gunten, who has returned to her home town (after 18 months in Z/Yen’s London office) to lead Z/Yen’s activities in Switzerland.
Michael and Ian joined Chiara in January where, after fondue and wine in the Old City, followed by mysterious, caption-competition fodder dodgy-looking extra-curricular activity after Chiara went home, …
…they nevertheless somehow managed to present themselves in good order the following morning at the Registry of Commerce in order to submit all required papers and legalise the signatures.
The very first official meeting of Z/Yen Group, Branch Geneva/Switzerland was held shortly after the legals at Chiara’s place near the Old City. It was an opportunity for Ian and Michael to:
A) Check out the new office’s location
B) Discuss project work and business development,
C) practice and play some harpsichord – an essential item in Geneva homes and offices (we are told).
Should you happen to be in Switzerland and/or want Z/Yen’s help in or out of Switzerland, feel free to contact Chiara directly (chiara_vongunten@zyen.com).
One of the Long Finance questions we frequently pose is, "can a 20-year-old responsibly enter into a financial structure for his or her retirement?” Our friends at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) are taking a daring, some might say foolhardy, step by actually asking 20 year olds (actually 18 to 25 year olds is the target range) what they think about financial services. While we recognize that not too many of our regulars meet that target demographic, we suspect that many of our readers have some influence over those who do, especially over the seasonal break.
Please do encourage those young people who fall within your sphere of influence to respond to the questionnaire. It is important research and we are very much supporting it. Naturally all responses are confidential but participants and encouragers alike can gain access to the results which will be published in a report and which are bound to be challenging and interesting.
For further information or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact sophie@csfi.org
The National Payroll Giving Awards 2011 took place last month. In our capacity as hosts of the Payroll Giving Centre, Z/Yen (by which we really mean Linda Cook and Sonya Raymond) worked closely with Institute of Fundraising people to organise the event. The Treasury (nudged by the Cabinet Office) were especially kind to the Payroll Giving Awards this year, allowing the event to be held at Number 11 Downing Street.
Unsurprisingly, the event was extremely well attended. Even The Chancellor himself popped in for a while to see what was going on. The Institute of Fundraising’s new Chief Executive, Peter Lewis, was the master of ceremonies and steered the event with great gusto. The event was hosted by another newbie; Chloe Smith. Indeed, the awards were her first ministerial engagement, as she was appointed Economic Secretary to the Treasury just a few days before the event. Chloe, together with Sir Gus O’Donnell, presented the awards.
Once again, Ian Harris had chaired the panel of judges. Ian’s work was done before the event; he could therefore spend the evening mingling while trying not to give away the results before the awards ceremony. Ian claims he is actually able to forget the names of all the winners by taking some special medicine early in the evening; as you can see from the following photograph, his glass of special medicine is empty.
The Best Large Employer and Best Overall Campaign awards went to Whitbread – jokes about organising things in a brewery should be confined to the headlines. You can see a list of all the category winners and their case studies here. The event was a huge success; Z/Yen is enormously proud to play its part in the Payroll Giving Awards.
Z/Yen can be pretty flexible about strategy, such as the time we moved into multi-lingual children’s publishing a decade ago; but that’s another story. It won’t surprise regular readers of Now & Z/Yen to learn that after the amazing success of last year’s blockbuster, Ultrahedge™, we returned to films this past summer. One of our clients was launching an innovative and environmentally-conscious gold exchange in China. They asked Z/Yen for help with the international marketing. Instead of flying people to China or organising a big tour for them abroad, we suggested a short film and video link to their big Beijing launch in order to keep down the emissions, and the costs. With a lot of help from a lot of friends, we managed to produce a film in under two weeks - wrote the script, turned our offices into a studio, then turned our offices into a cinema on the big day with live links to senior officials in Beijing. We even managed to create a lot of homework for Michael by making him translate the script into Chinese with huge amounts of help from his teacher (didn’t he only get a “B-” in this easy subject?, ed). A big part of the effort was getting international coverage. We’re very pleased that YouTube viewing figures for the different video segments are now over 100,000, while web mentions of the client went from nothing to over 300,000 in just three months. Just click for a two minute introduction to our client, Pan Asia Gold Exchange (and an after-boost to the figures too!).
Strange but true … Last year Mark did a radio interview on global financial centres. Nothing odd there you might say, but then you may not know Mark. Later the same day, all eleven minutes of this interview appeared on the internet as a podcast – nothing too unusual in the digital age. The story becomes more far-fetched when the podcast was offered as a mobile phone ringtone. Whilst we all know that nobody is daft enough to download Mark’s dulcet tones onto their mobiles, Mark was secretly delighted at the prospect of hearing his voice on the 18:34 from Cannon Street as busy financial professionals were called on their way home. Imagine our surprise when Mark recently received an email telling him that his interview was one of the most popular downloads the radio station concerned had ever had! We haven’t sent you the link as the site tends to try and download something resembling malware … or is that Mark-Ware?
Not to be outdone on new media, Michael too features on a YouTube mashup – ‘Handel with Mandel’ is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8zUT4dVv1Q. At an electronics music day, "Robobox", in Ipswich in 2008, then 16 year old Galen Reich and his father Fraser Reich scored and performed a video with Mandelbrot graphics featuring Michael on vocals using fragments of Michael’s 2008 Gresham Lecture – “Perfectly Unpredictable: Why Forecasting Produces Useful Rubbish” - http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/perfectly-unpredictable-why-forecasting-produces-useful-rubbish - where Michael describes early uses of fractals in cartography. Trainspotters? Pas nous!
After more than sixteen happy years at St Helen’s Place, Z/Yen has now moved to 90 Basinghall Street. Not natural movers, Z/Yen needed to make this move due to the redevelopment of St Helen’s Place.
What does come naturally to Z/Yen is to take on all its tasks with zest and zeal. The move team, led by Linda Cook and Monique Gore, did a cracking good job of finding excellent premises, having them kitted out to Z/Yen’s specification and getting Z/Yen up and running at the new place with the minimum of fuss.
90 Basinghall Street is an astonishingly suitable place for Z/Yen to live. The building is on the corner of Gresham Street and Basinghall Street (indeed the property was formerly called 89-91 Gresham Street). For those readers with long memories, Z/Yen’s very first City offices were in Gresham Street. And for those readers with even longer memories, Gresham College was located in our very building for many decades of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rumours that Michael gave the inaugural lecture at the site in 1842 are yet to be verified.
For those of you who are fans of Z/Yen Perspectives, have no fear. Little has changed in that regard, although we have slightly modified and updated our world view based on our new home:
All phone numbers and e-mail addresses remain unchanged.
If you want to write to us the traditional way, or visit our offices, the full address is:
90 Basinghall Street
London
EC2V 5AY
United Kingdom
For more details on how to visit with the minimum of fuss, click here. If you happen to be nearby, please do stop by and take a look at Z/Yen’s super new place.
Mid July and that means the annual Z/Yen Tennis “Tournament” at Boston Manor Tennis Club. In the absence of Jez, Monique did an amazing job organising the tournament, with a little help from Ian who ducked out of playing to give everyone else a chance to win…OK, to even up the numbers. A combination of Monique’s fiendish pairings and the adverse weather conditions early on made the playing field remarkably even, talent-wise, as evidenced by several really close games between the nine pairs. One early encounter had Steph on one side and Janie on the other, a sledging death match if ever there was one, with Janie’s more extensive experience of ladette sporting behaviour earning a narrow victory.
In one semi-final, Michael & Chris pipped Dima & Janie by dint of a tie-breaker, while Heinrich & Nick won a seemingly-never-ending deuce game to win their semi without a tie-break. Michael & Chris then won the final quite decisively, with Michael displaying some out-of character alpha male body language once he realised he was closing in on a tournament win. Rumours that Michael only won by dint of a bung to Ian the umpire are strongly denied – there is no evidence whatsoever.
But as always the winner was tennis… …well actually the winner was food and drink. Dennis and Victor produced an amazing barbeque, the rain stopped and the sun came out to smile on us as the tournament drew to a close. The post tennis eating, drinking and merry-making went on long after the tennis was (almost) forgotten.
In partnership with animators at the London Film Museum, Z/Yen has begun a six month Technology Strategy Board (TSB) research programme called “Avatars In Rich Data Worlds”. The research aims to graft animated characters onto PropheZy trading programmes so that the avatars’ expressions convey an algorithm’s evaluation of complex data environments. For example, an Avatar tipster might frown and point, indicating that something is probably the best choice, but a bit confusing. Or point angrily when you ignore something it’s sure is good for you. Naturally, we hope to let people create their own avatars to do their trading.
Michael originally had an idea for automated PropheZy bots to make our ExtZy game experience more interesting. Ben Morris and Nick Danev worked up some ideas and backtested PropheZy’s predictive performance. All of Z/Yen participated in developing characters for the automated players – what’s their favourite film? Avatar. How do they get to work? Spaceship. What’s their favourite colour? [enough - Ed] Some clients in financial services, gaming and gambling wondered aloud if they too could use automated tipsters to make their own websites simpler and livelier to use. Then Stephen Haggard noticed that “Avatars In Rich Data Worlds” was eligible for partial funding under the TSB’s Creative Industries stream, pulled together a formal project, found an exciting partner in the London Film Museum, and roped in our new recruit, Damee Adesokan, to help him.
People using information-rich environments, such as financial services, often feel they’ve opened a Pandora’s world of information [I’ll let that slide, but no more - Ed]. When all of the data is displayed, most of the people turn off, because (research thesis) people need an opinion against which they can react. However, in information-rich environments, particularly fast-changing ones, it’s too expensive to provide human opinions to help users Na’vi-gate. “Avatars In Rich Data Worlds” provides new ways for users to interact online with complex information. By way of analogy, if one imagines going to the horse races, avatars perform the role of “tipsters”, telling you how an experienced race-goer evaluates the forthcoming races. Z/Yen is seeing if we can build automated tipsters for large and important, but boring, sites that will help people make better decisions with copious information. The project builds on earlier work Z/Yen did in The Financial £aboratory visualising risk in virtual worlds with military technology, which inspired PropheZy and VizZy.
We could probably have proved the concept with smiley faces, such as Cameron’s, but it is far more interesting to work with the cartoon wizards at London Film Museum. The London Film Museum is a creative hub to some of the digital animation teams who brought you Star Wars and other CGI films. Our animation partners have a hunch that we can go further and build Hollywood characters to organise your online world. Now & Z/Yen’s hunch is that a lot of Z/Yen folk are going to “pimp their avatars” with blue skin. Must be all the Smurf fans.
Z/Yen is saddened to learn that a beloved temporary worker – Simon Strez – is returning to New Zealand. Even those who think the permanent employees should be better loved first (down! Ed.), are going to miss Simon’s always upbeat and bright approach to work, let alone life.
During his stay in London, Simon has been an enthusiast for London black cabs, ExtZy and trips round Europe. Simon is rather famous in the office for heading off, backpack shouldered, to some exotic (read “party”) location in Europe only to return to the office the next day, having discovered the air and rail transportation systems for which the UK is justly famous.
Like many underpaid workers in the City, Simon supplements his below-acceptable-earnings by gambling heavily on ExtZy. But unlike some, Simon was struck, Damascene-like, by a bolt of heartfelt philanthropy on his way home. In his own words, “With the dramatic and devastating events that have happened to my home town of Christchurch, New Zealand, over the past 6 months, I have found it difficult to come to terms with nature causing such hurt and suffering. I found myself struggling to sleep, feeling depressed and utterly useless trying to find ways of helping my ruined city whilst living so far away."
"With my time here in the UK coming to an end and an ExtZy account with credits to spare, I knew it was time to cash the Zoints in. I therefore decided to donate the entirety of my winnings to the British Red Cross New Zealand Earthquake Appeal. I am confident that with a little help from everyone, Christchurch can be restored to its former glory and its people can continue to show the world what makes it a great city.”
With a small tear in the eye, as his spark will be missed, Z/Yen wishes Simon and the people of Christchurch, “Godspeed”.
Our own Ian Harris is quite used to press coverage when he goes travelling. Avid Now and Z/Yen readers might recall Michael’s obscure account of Ian’s fame in the newspapers of Bhutan, in 2000. Last month, Ian was in the state of Chhattisgarh, in central India. For reasons Ian finds hard to explain, he found himself in demand to do some cricket commentary on an Interstate competition match in Jagdalpur. It seems that no-one asked Ian the rather obvious question, “have you ever done cricket commentary before?” to which Ian’s answer would have been a rather emphatic, “no!”.
Still, you might observe from the following photographs that Ian was able to look the part at least.
Ian even threw in one word of cricket Hindi, “chakka”, when the ball sailed over the commentary tent for six. After his stint, both Ian and Janie were interviewed at length for cable television and several newspapers. Now and Z/Yen can’t help thinking that the whole incident might have been a case of mistaken identity. But just look at Ian’s blasé “oh yes, I do cricket commentary and press interviews all the time” body language and facial expression in following photograph.
This historic event made the front page of New India and the back page of the Bastar Sun.
Those of you with Hindi-reading skills or connections with Hindi readers might get the above scans translated, but Ian assures Now and Z/Yen readers that none of the material facts in the articles are true. Now and Z/Yen is not sure who to believe, but readers have the opportunity to win a bottle of bubbly in the Z/Yen caption competition if you can tell us what the headline ought to have been before 31 March 2011.
Z/Yen is delighted to announce that Ian Harris has been appointed Chair of BCS, The Chartered Institute For IT’s Ethics Group. As a result, Ian will also join the Institute’s Professionalism Board. Ian has been a member of the Ethics Group for several years now, during the last couple of which he served as a vice-chair. Why ethics groups have someone responsible for vice is a bit of a mystery to most of us, but Ian assures us that it is all right, proper and above board.
Joking aside, one of Ian’s main projects with the Ethics Group has been to lead the development of a meta-methodology for the ethical assessment of new technologies. Coincidentally, almost as if to celebrate Ian’s BCS elevation, the Ethics Group’s paper on that subject has just been published by the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society. Any Now and Z/Yen readers interested in this groundbreaking and practical work should contact ian_harris@zyen.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it – BCS (through Ian) is actively seeking people who want to help test the methodology and/or collaborate in other ways to help take these fascinating ideas forward.
Fairness is the new buzz-word, from Fairtrade to fair cuts. The institution you trust with your money could be amongst the twenty-something participants in the latest FairBanking research initiative. FairBanking is an independent research-based charity dedicated to encouraging and helping retail banks improve the financial well-being of their customers. FairBanking asked Z/Yen to spread the word and chivvy all major UK retail banks and building societies to contribute details on how their credit card, current account and savings products help customers manage their money.
Unlike the wicked step-mother in Snow White, Z/Yen does not possess a magic mirror. It does, however, possess the magical touch delivered by Leonor Fishman, lead consultant on this project, who was able to round-up 50% of the institutions approached to participate. Leonor, along with Ben Morris and Michael Mainelli at Z/Yen beavered away since October 2010 to design and promote the research along with analysing the findings of these products. FairBanking's work featured twice in the Financial Times in 2010, so it is likely the first report featuring bank participation will receive some publicity in spring 2011.
Mark has again beaten Michael to the more glamorous locations. In December, whilst Michael was making do with learning to speak Chinese in the City and a one day trip to Wales (where it was raining), Mark spent four days in China (speaking English) and five days in Turkey. He spoke to 350 people at a conference in Shenzhen about the future for Chinese cites as financial centres and then addressed an even larger audience at a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Whilst at the conference, Mark shared the a stage with ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone at a panel discussion – Mark was talking about Istanbul’s strategy of attracting inward investment and Ken was bemoaning the state of the underground system in London. Quite what the audience made of these two contrasting Englishmen remains the subject of some conjecture…
On 30 November 02010, more than 50 people gathered at Barnard’s Inn Hall to attend a round table discussion to launch Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Future of Pensions by Con Keating. This publication is the second Finance Short in the Long Finance publications programme.
Con Keating was joined by panellists Colin Melvin (CEO, Hermes Equity Ownership Services) and Philip Sadler (Senior Research Fellow, Tomorrow’s Company). The panel session was chaired by Professor Michael Mainelli (Director, Z/Yen Group).
Con introduced the paper with the somewhat controversial statement that defined benefits (DB) pension schemes are sustainable over the long term. In short, all that is required is less erroneous analysis, better regulation and more innovative management of pension schemes. In particular, Con criticises the management cost of DB schemes as the sector is currently structured, especially smaller schemes which can cost around 7% per annum to service.
Ian Harris, Managing Director of Z/Yen Group Limited, delivered a special Gresham College lecture at the Museum of London, the climax of the Gresham series “Beyond Crisis”. The lecture, Changing Money: Communities, Longer Term Finance and You included some biting comments on the modern system of money and responses to the recent financial crisis.
On quantitative easing, Ian said: “So how much does a dose of QE actually add to the money system? It depends on how much lending and therefore additional fractional reserve money results from the central bank injection – i.e. no-one knows. You have to try it and find out. But one thing you very rarely hear about is a dose quantitative Imodium or quantitative constipation if matters get out of hand”.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is an enormous cooperative effort. The SWIFT network is the backbone of international money transfer, connecting over 9,000 banks in over 200 countries. The SWIFT International Banking Operations Seminar (SIBOS) has long been the banking industry’s biggest annual event, attracting nearly 10,000 people, this year to Amsterdam. And this year SWIFT gave a green light for Long Finance to visit the red lights of Amsterdam from 25 to 29 October 2010.
SWIFT likes challenging SIBOS attendees with new thinking. Two years ago SWIFT started an initiative, Innotribe, a set of events, tools and projects, to enable collaborative innovation in financial services. At SIBOS, Innotribe are hosting events on four themes - cloud, mobile, smart data, and Long Finance. The Long Finance theme will focus on radical scenarios for financial services – if payments are free, who pays? what happens when there is no more poverty? would we have a better world without credit and debt? Here is a short video giving you an idea on these and other topics that Innotribe aim to tackle at the conference.
Earlier this week, we published the eighth Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI 8). This index is sponsored by the Qatar Financial Centre Authority and features ranks and ratings of 75 financial centres. GFCI 8 is part of the Financial Centre Futures which is itself a theme of the Long Finance initiative.
The big change from GFCI 7 in March 2010 is that Hong Kong has clearly joined London and New York as one of the ‘Big Three’ Global Financial Centres. Key points from GFCI 8 include:
♦ Hong Kong (760) has steadily closed the gap with London and New York over three years - now just 10 points behind New York compared with 76 in March 2007;
♦ there has been no significant difference between London (772) and New York (770) in the GFCI ratings since GFCI was first published in 2007;
♦ Singapore (728) is currently the most likely contender to become the fourth global financial centre;
♦ confidence in the future of financial centres has fallen since GFCI 7, as shown by lower overall ratings – 53 centres having lower ratings in GFCI 8 compared with just 17 centres having higher ratings (five have the same ratings as in GFCI 7);
♦ Asia continues to rise, with Shanghai now into the top ten and Seoul into the top 25;
♦ financial centres tipped to become more significant in the next few years are all Asian – Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing and Seoul;
♦ since the financial crises began, all offshore centres show larger falls than average.
GFCI 8 uses 33,023 financial centre assessments completed by 1,876 financial services professionals. To view GFCI 8 or to participate in GFCI 9 by rating the financial centres with which you are familiar, please click here. If you would like a hard copy of the report please email Z/Yen to request one.
If it's summer that means there must be some sort of Z/Yen cricket match and 2010 was no exception. We decided to play a pairs tournament this year, which made sure that everyone got a go. Indeed, Xenia Mainelli was drafted in as a last minute replacement for her mother and came a close second – and who are we to judge whether her contribution or that of Louwrens was the key to that partnership’s success. Chiara, fresh over from Switzerland and experiencing cricket for the first time managed to take two wickets, which is quite an achievement.
We found ourselves switched at the last minute to Kensington Memorial Park this year – a rather small field populated by locals unaccustomed to the sound of leather on willow. So much so, that Louwrens achieved the champagne moment by clearing the outfield, pushing a toddler who got stuck on his tricycle at the wrong moment, somewhere between deep square leg and cow corner. Congratulations to the winners, Jacques Malan & Simon McMullen. Rumours of match fixing at Z/Yen cricket matches are most certainly untrue, but we can confirm that the 2011 cricket match will be won by Ian Harris in partnership with Linda Cook.
Actually, both Ian and Linda showed more aptitude for the wine tasting a couple of weeks later. Organised for us by Linda’s brother, Gordon, the event (or at least the excuse for the event) was to celebrate Jez Horne’s imminent wedding. And indeed congratulations to Jez and Sarah on their nuptials.
As is the Z/Yen way, the wine tasting included a competitive element, which comprised guessing the wines from the descriptions and also recognising pictures of sports personalities from the wine producing nations concerned. The combined forces of Monique, Flynn and Kirsten won that competition.
To round off that evening, most of the gathering decamped for a round of crazy golf (actually a mixture of crazy golf and crazy pool) in Devonshire Square. That fierce competition was won jointly by Mary O’Callaghan and Michael Mainelli. In Michael’s case, at least, the victory confirms some folklore about mis-spent youth, plus the prevailing view that if the activity is crazy, Michael will be good at it.
How do you ensure freshwater and forest resources aren't depleted further? Here's a recipe: a handful of Z/Yen staff, a dozen scientists, a roomful of private sector professionals, mix thoroughly but don't stir. On the afternoon of Wednesday 21 June forty professionals gathered in the City Marketing Suite at the City of London Corporation to participate in the Finance, Water & Forestry symposium.
Z/Yen, as a delivery partner of the Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network, hosted two workshops in June on Finance & Water and Finance & Forestry. These workshops were held on behalf of Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to do an initial scoping for water and forestry data and the modelling needs of investment decision-makers. The aim of the symposium was to present initial findings from both workshops, driven by the central question "Where's the Data?"
Scientists from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) came from across the UK to engage with the curious audience. Leonor Fishman and Stephanie Rochford, authors of the water and forestry papers respectively, each gave a short presentation outlining the findings of their enquiries to date. A lively and thought-provoking debate followed both presentations.
The final reports will be launched separately at the Long Finance Finance & Forestry Roundtable on 20 September and the London Accord Autumn Conference on 12 October, where there will be further opportunities for blending with NERC scientists.
Last week, the Z/Yen team and associates did tennis the Z/Yen way. About 30 of us descended upon Boston Manor, with a view to 16 of us competing for the heralded Z/Yen ChampionZ trophy. It was Chiara von Gunten’s first working day, so we hope she doesn’t get into the habit of knocking off work every day at 15:30 and spending the rest of the afternoon enjoying sport and revelry. Within about 15 seconds of starting practice with her randomly-picked doubles partner, Ian Harris, she had “caught him amidships” from behind. Not a good career move on your first day, Chiara.
Undeterred, Ian did his share at the net, even after wearing one from Big Nick Danev at close to point blank range. Chiara and Ian ended up defeated semi-finalists, as did Simon Strez (pictured below, modelling designer shades from the pound shop) and Stephanie Rochford, the latter showing a competitive spirit perhaps modelled on that of John McEnroe. Meanwhile Maury Shenk won the John McEnroe lookalike contest and went on, together with his partner Ben Morris, to the final. But they in turn were defeated by Joey Crouse and Leonor Fishman, despite the unfeasibly maritime sound to the partnership “Crouse and Fishman”. Well done them.
With the barbeque sizzling and the refreshments flowing, the tennis competition soon became secondary, although plenty of people enjoyed some makeshift tennis after the tournament ended. The revelry went on long after dark, which takes some late-night stamina at this time of year.
Chiara, by the way, joins Z/Yen initially on a three month contract, primarily to look after the London Accord. But, as quite a few Z/Yen stalwarts can attest, “many stay longer”. Welcome, Chiara.
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