Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world, there is nothing certain but death and taxes.” I’d like to add one intertwined level of certainty – the modern staple. In fact, staples are killing worker productivity and they’re a major part of our tax process.
When I began my career in finance almost 20 years ago, the CFO was a very different position to the role it is today. I started out in the Big Four (when it was the Big Five) and spent the first 12 years of my career working with many different CFOs across a broad spectrum of industries and countries.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) will turn the power sector (PS) into a Blue Ocean Strategy market, and investors will have to adapt accordingly. (Blue Ocean Strategy focuses on capturing untapped demand through the creation of new products that make the competition irrelevant.)
It is nearly 50 years since the introduction of the Equal Pay Act, yet the gender pay gap persists. The UK tech industry is no better than other traditionally male-dominated industries, with Mercer reporting that men in high-tech companies earn 25 per cent more than women, compared to the gap in the UK overall of 18 per cent.
Many of the most dynamic technological innovations in the last 25 years have promoted the idea of breaking down barriers, improving accessibility, and bringing the world’s citizens closer together than ever before.
Financial technology, or fintech (FT), will affect investment banking (IB) by affecting the various lists of services that they offer. However, two concepts need to be clarified before these effects can be analyzed in detail. First, the scope of FT needs to be defined by the most recent technology.
Shrewd households have a mechanism for saving and investing in good times to help augment future income and mitigate future monetary crises. Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) do a similar job for nations.
None of us are getting any younger, but, in a way, the workplace is. Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce in both the UK and US. By next year, this cohort – and the even younger Generation Z group that follows them – will make up more than half the workforce globally.
The general public have a long-held misconception that the financial sector is inherently untrustworthy. Whether that’s a legacy of the financial crisis of the late 2000s or just a cliché that just won’t go away, it’s hard to avoid the fact that two-thirds of Britons do not trust banks.
In the past couple of decades, due diligence has evolved and improved, thanks in large part to the advance of technology and digitisation. Where before the process was frustrated by physical data rooms and huge volumes of paper documents