The FS Club Podcast

Turks and Caicos (T&C) is a British Overseas Territory and archipelago of 40 low-lying coral islands in the Atlantic Ocean. Over recent years, and with the aim of encouraging investment from international institutions and firms, T&C has introduced a number of legislative measures, including legislation on banking, confidentiality, companies, insurance and trusts to name a few. The desire t...

Employee ownership works. Companies perform better and employees end up with substantially more wealth. But employee ownership is still the exception. Share plans in the UK aim to replicate USA Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), but, unlike in the USA model, employee ownership trusts in the UK are not set up so that employees typically benefit from the growth in share value in their accounts...

Sheriff and Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli, Alderman of the City of London and Executive Chairman of Z/Yen Group, Emeritus Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Commerce, Gresham College and former Director, Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, Ministry of Defence, UK Recorded for the 38th Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime

Given the current economic outlook due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies will be concerned with maintaining cash flow and cutting costs wherever possible. Our panel of experts from France, Germany, the UK and the US will discuss whether it would be possible, and advisable, to replace a portion of an employee’s salary with equity grants, and the related employment, securities and tax law consider...

Today’s international & off-shore financial centres (IFCs) contain good and bad, from money launderers and tax evaders to long-term planners and legitimate but complex wholesale financiers. The rapidly changing trade and economic environment affects financial services and thus financial centres. Perhaps no sector is likely to undergo more change than that of IFCs. For years IFCs were presumed...

Do your board members share the same view on risk around the table? Governance and compliance might focus attention through the risk appetite statement, but ESG and Impact investment throw up new Performance related challenges on the true level of risk understanding.  Funds based on Environment, Social and Governance performance are now established mainstream, with the category catapulted int...

Toronto has consistently ranked highly in the Global Financial Centres Index. Naturally it features highly among North American financial centres. A key player in this development has been TMX Group, owner of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), one of the world’s largest stock exchanges. TSX plays a significant role in supporting innovation and access to capital. In this webinar, Jennifer Reynolds,...

It goes without saying that in financial services, trust is a vital commodity. The potential dividends of trust and ethical conduct are significant. Employees are far more likely to be engaged and live your organization's values, be strongly committed to their job and the customers they serve. While customers are far more likely to advocate on your behalf, stay loyal, and crucially buy your produc...

Amid the global pandemic, a financial services industry survey conducted jointly by the UK-based Financial Services Club and US-based Ravco Marketing, sponsored by Salesforce, has found that the industry sees a silver lining resulting from COVID-19. Most think the crisis has had a positive influence on their customer and employee relationships, on the market fit for their current products, and the...

What does employee share ownership really mean? What opportunities are there for effective employee share ownership?  Looking at the design and structure of schemes, the human resources dimension, the origins of Eso and its political appeal in the UK and internationally, employee share schemes expert David Craddock will take us to the heart of the matter on the case for employee share ownersh...

Marketplaces are evolving in ways that can seem to be stacked against regular people. Some claim that aggressive new labour markets like Uber mislead work-seekers, slash pay, withhold data, systematically undermine regulation, impede training, and lobby against worker rights. They claim Uber is not an outlier; it’s a pathfinder for labour market platforms covering thousands of sectors. Some point...

Marc has spent over a decade photographing endangered and extinct species of animals and plants – specimens found in the collections of The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He started working on www. Extinction.photo because he wanted to say something about what is happening in an age in which human activity dominates the environment on an unprecedented scale. The images and stories in...

Z/Yen conducts an irregular series of short webinars, CommunityZ Chest, featuring people from its various communities and clubs, viz. technology, financial services, civil society, and business. These webinars provide an opportunity to meet people from the wider CommunityZ, to share ideas, and to make connections.  This CommunityZ Chest features the former British diplomat Edmund Fitton-Brown...

Investec’s Kevin Lim will chat with his guest Laura McNeil of Blue Prism on how business is faring and how her and her colleagues’ work life has changed during the current circumstances. He will ask about the company's share plan and how it has been performing since lockdown. Speakers:   Laura McNeil is Assistant Company Secretary & International Share Plans Manager at AIM listed technolo...

This FS Club webinar features Julian Enoizi from Pool Re. Join us for what promises to be a deep and wide ranging discussion covering the following:  27 years of building resilience to terrorism risk through public-private partnership; The repercussions of the Covid-19 crisis for the (re)insurance industry, and potential responses; and The broader role of public-private risk financing and res...

We cannot afford to allow the huge sums that have now been committed to economic recovery in the wake of the first wave of covid-19 to be spent on propping up harmful carbon intensive economies, unsustainable growth models and damaging inequalities. We need to ensure that this massive fiscal investment accelerates Europe and the world towards decarbonisation; that it invests in regeneration of the...

A top-level discussion bringing together the former Chair of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, a journalist and publisher of Defence Analysis and the Sheriff of the City of London.  This is the second discussion in the Global Britain – Polarisation, Grey Zone and Hybrid Conflict project, part of the Cityforum Intelligent Defence and Smart Power series and will probe what we face, what we could...

As countries are starting to reopen their economies and easing lockdown restrictions, the threat of uncertain economic recovery and the possibility of secondary pandemic waves across all liquid asset classes still looms large.  In this webinar, we will:  Uncover why using ‘conventional wisdom’ and ‘basic economic facts’ that harness past data for future extrapolation purposes is a futile...

Mick McAteer is an informed and friendly critic of UK financial services and how it handles its customers and the financially excluded. In this webinar he will share his views on the many circumstances from at least 2007, including things such as payment protection insurance (PPI), RBS Global Restructuring Group, Brexit, and now Covid-19, and their effect on the state of UK financial services. He...

Share valuation is a key step in the design and implementation of an employee share scheme for an unquoted company. Tax or fiscal valuations in the UK are subject to special rules which have evolved over time out of a combination of case law and legislation. Whether a valuation is acceptable for tax purposes is ultimately a matter for HMRC.  HMRC’s Shares & Assets Valuation Office reviews...

What would insurance, and our wider financial system, look like if it were designed to fit its purpose? “Shining a spotlight on our financial system reveals a number of imperfections. It is no more efficient than it was a century ago. It is subject to serial crises. It is uneven in providing good long-term governance of corporations and other assets. It is disconnected from the needs of its ultima...

One element of investing in companies is risk. Most often, this is a result of the market forces at work such as a company’s financial performance. However, there are times when portfolio value is affected by factors outside the market, such as corporate misrepresentations.  When value is wrongly affected, securities class actions may be a means of compensating investors for a loss that was o...

In this webinar, we launched the first edition of the Smart Centres Index (SCI 1). The SCI is designed to track the development of technology and financial centres across the world in their support for and readiness for new technology applications.  Investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, media, academics, governments, and regulators can attune their cities to attract innovation and growth in S...

The average company only lives for ten years, even large corporates perish after approximately four decades. A company that hits its 100th birthday has done rather well indeed.  And, yet the cities of London or Paris, Rome or Beijing, have existed for millennia. Post Covid-19, we should therefore refocus our attention on what makes for prosperous cities and towns. These are the real engines o...

The Share Incentive Plan (SIP) is an all-employee share gifting and share purchase scheme. Introduced in the Finance Act 2000, alongside the Enterprise Management Incentive, it consists of four modules: free shares, partnership shares, matching shares, and dividend shares.  In this webinar, William Franklin will discuss how to make good use of this plan to award shares to your employees in a...