Banking

In August 2015, Tom Hayes, then aged 34, was sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment after being found guilty on eight charges of conspiracy to commit fraud when working as a yen derivatives trader in Tokyo. Hayes was alleged by the Serious Fraud Office to be the grand ‘ringmaster’ of a group of traders who sought to enrich their banks and themselves by rigging Libor, the rate charged for interbank loans. His sentence was reduced to 11 years on appeal but it is still one of the longest–ever jail sentences handed out by a British court for a white-collar crime. A subsequent court hearing ordered the seizure of assets worth more

Last week, my mobile phone stopped working. No big deal you might think. If you can get emails on your computer, and you’ve got a landline and that old-fashioned thing, post, why, you’re not cut off, are you? There are, of course, people who wilfully eschew their phones so as to be more in touch with the present moment… birds, clouds, flowers etc. And I’m hardly a junkie. I don’t do social media. I’m a grown-up, so I’m not on Snapchat. Not having a phone should have been fine. But as I discovered, I was quickly cut out of society. First off, you can’t tell the time. Obviously, when you’ve

Please don’t suppose I’m unaware I’ve been an idiot. I recount what happened to me last week without expecting your sympathy or understanding, and this account carries only the very slightest plea in mitigation: the suggestion that it could happen to you too, even if you don’t think you’d ever be so stupid. Because I certainly didn’t think I was. I’m not IT-illiterate, I’m not particularly slow-witted, I’ve attended ‘take online security seriously’ lectures, and I do know about the new ways thieves steal from the unsuspecting these days. I’m forewarned. So I thought myself proof against such attempts when the landline phone rang on Friday morning. My partner had

We’re meant to be a nation of pioneers. Back in the seventeenth century we set sail in search of exotic bounty. This was a time when most people still believed that the earth was flat, and if you sailed too far, you’d simply fall off the edge. But as we  set sail into even choppier Brexit waters, a riddle remains at the heart of the banking industry: Why aren’t more of us prepared to switch current accounts? Over the last few years it’s been hammered home that switching is easy. The Current Account Switch Guarantee, run by Bacs, claims to make it simple, reliable and stress-free. It’s even available for

Let’s be honest: when most of us think about Jersey the words ‘tax’ and ‘avoidance’ come quickly to mind. Okay, so maybe Bergerac, cows and potatoes first, but financial chicanery certainly isn’t far behind. That was certainly my association when I got a call from Jersey Finance Limited (JFL), the financial sector’s industry body. They were looking to review how they communicated the Crown Dependency’s financial services offering and wanted a strategic partner to help share these messages. I have to admit that I knew next-to-nothing about the largest of the Channel Islands, nestled between England and France. A year on, I know a little more about the Bailiwick of

When I first visited Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was struck by a set of black-and-white posters in the shopping concourse advertising the Co-op Bank’s ethical banking stance: essentially, no lending to arms, tobacco, gambling or oil companies, or to regimes that disrespected human rights. A cynic might have argued that it was all about virtue signalling (before we learned that phrase) in the sense that no landmine manufacturer or brutal Third World dictator had ever been known to pop into a Co-op branch, ask for a loan and be met with a polite refusal and a copy of the policy. But it was a smart exercise in

With Christmas – and its potential for gifts of money from generous Godparents – fast approaching, now is a great time for children to open up their first savings account. Here are some of the best deals on the market right now, according to data from moneyfacts.co.uk.