Essays on rational absurdity of banking
Newsletters, storyboards, data visuals, resources, book reviews and other pieces that matter but sit outside the main thematic essays.
Archegos Capital (AC), a New York based family office, was in news recently for its inability to meet margin calls by lenders. Wall Street was jittery reminiscing the nightmares of LTCM. Media stocks like Viacom tumbled 25-30% while marquee Investment Banks like Nomura and Credit Suisse indicated significant losses. We cut through the clutter of media reports, deep dived, simplified the story and picked a lesson or two for us bankers.
India has lagged behind the world in increasing ATM network. While the network grew from 1 Lakh ATMs in 2012 to 2.35 Lakhs in 202, it was still low. Building physical infra is always a costly affair!
In this storyboard, we looked at deep dived into data and got everything you need to understand India’s ATM story, at one place.
Frauds have been Bank’s Achilles heel for time immemorial. FY20 saw a astonishing 160% rise in the reported frauds over previous year. This is despite the increased regulatory oversight, use of technology and increasing digitisation of data. But seems the fraudsters move one step ahead of the system. But there are some twists in the tale. In this storyboard we looked at the reported data for Indian Banks, deep dived and found some interesting observations.
From – 0.75% (Switzerland) to almost Zero in most of Europe to around 4% in India, Central Banks in most economies remain accommodative. Although inflation mostly remains benign, some high inflation economies like Argentina (38%) and Venezuela (39%), have their plates overflowing with challenges. While the GDP projections are encouraging, whether cheaper credit can fuel a rebound in economic activity, remains to be seen.