It’s been a while since a former British Lord Chancellor declared “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, striking a populist note in the lead up to the UK’s Brexit referendum. In Watching the English, an entertaining book recommended to me when I first immigrated to this country, anthropologist Kate Fox writes about the English having “vestigial traces of a ‘culture of amateurism’, involving an instinctive mistrust of professionalism”. Others have argued about the superiority of generalists in a highly specialised world.1
Recently, the Fnality ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) Community of Practice organised a live Q&A session with Meghan Foreman-Purves, Head of Legal, Europe for CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce). It was a session that all of us at Fnality found insightful and inspiring, so we are delighted to share Meghan's experiences and advice around topics such as leadership, overcoming career obstacles, and parenthood in the workplace with a broader audience in this blog post.
Meghan was, until very recently, a Director of CIBC’s UK regulated subsidiary, and has recently been welcomed to the Fnality Community as CIBC’s Board Observer and Shareholder Representative.
From the International Day of Friendship to International Asteroid Day, the United Nations’ annual celebration of human life and history aims to bring awareness and offer opportunities for learning and participation across language, health, culture, science, and more. During lockdowns around the world in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, towns and cities appeared almost deserted overnight; once bustling streets became ghost-towns, before ‘furlough’, ‘social distancing’ and ‘Zoom calls’ were common lexicon. Whereas parts of life seemed to grind to a halt, healthcare was pushed to its limit as hospitals and morgues filled, and communities were put at risk when demand outran supply. No...
Four years ago, my Fnality (formally known as the ‘USC Project’) journey began. I walked into a little office by St Pauls Cathedral that looked like something between the Apple store (read slick and technologically advanced) and a beach hut (read rustic, laid back and the kind of place you wanted to hang out) and contained a handful of geniuses! I took a seat at my new desk and tried to take it all in; new job, new role, new colleagues, new industry, new city. It quickly dawned on me, I’m no longer living in Devon, working in uniform at a major trauma hospital. I’m now working for a super cool technology research and development company in the heart of London, focused on making...
Is there a better recipe for disaster than changing career, dive headfirst into a new industry, meet a new team only virtually, leave your home and move to a new city - all while in lockdown in the middle of a pandemic?
As part of our Fnality Global Payments Insights series, Fnality recently published a paper – Fnality Global Payments & Wholesale CBDC – that explores the proliferation and development of CBDC projects. It examines the pressing issues in wholesale financial markets that have prompted such innovation, and how, in the current absence of viable wholesale CBDC or DLT-based RTGS renewal programmes, Fnality Global Payments can offer novel solutions to the problems these arrangements seek to solve.
Following 25 years working in post trade banking roles, an opportunity arose to try something different - FinTech.
Bank of England publishes an omnibus accounts policy to enable innovative payment systems
