Mark Baker

Jul 19, 2024 | euromoney.com | Mark Baker

When Jennifer Piepszak and Troy Rohrbaugh stood up to present at JPMorgan’s investor day in May 2024, they had a good story to tell. As the recently appointed co-CEOs of the bank’s expanded commercial and investment bank (CIB), they were able to present a business that is by almost any measure at the very top of its game. It had a spectacular 2023, and all the more so for the fact that the underlying climate in much of investment banking was far from spectacular.

Jul 12, 2024 | euromoney.com | Mark Baker

Two pieces of news competed for least surprising financial services headline this week, although it is a fair bet that one got more attention than the other. Top billing went to the fraud and market manipulation conviction for Bill Hwang, former owner of Archegos Capital Management. But equally predictable was the somewhat less flashy news that Tyler Dickson was leaving Citi and heading to Blackstone, where he will be global head of client relations.

Jun 7, 2024 | euromoney.com | Mark Baker

The US has bitten the voluntary carbon market (VCM) bullet. Last week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced a set of principles that the administration of president Joe Biden would like to see adopted by participants in VCMs – both when buying the credits that the market deals in and when certifying the integrity of those credits. On the face of it, this is an important step.

May 31, 2024 | euromoney.com | Mark Baker

One evening in early 2024, treasury officials at a Fortune 50 company were eyeing a screen nervously. Just four hours after beginning the onboarding process for Royal Bank of Canada’s new US cash-management platform, they were about to transact on it for the first time. They couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing; some asked themselves if they had merely been shown a demo. “How do we know it’s real?” asked one.

May 16, 2024 | euromoney.com | Mark Baker

Anyone looking for a striking image of what makes technological innovation so difficult in traditional banking need look no further than the extraordinary 3D model that Rabobank constructed of its IT systems back in 2017. The model, which took months to construct, is a bewilderingly intricate mass of connections between thousands of desks, showing the ways in which all the different systems communicate – or fail to communicate – with each other.