Newbies

There are several new faces on the Z/Yen scene. Lorna Bailey and Laura Kinch have joined in the last couple of weeks to help beef up the Practice Management team, which has expanded its responsibilities and workload enormously over the past few months, not least with its work on the Payroll Giving Grants initiative. Z/Yen also welcomes Jeremy (Jez) Horne, who has joined, initially on a short-term contract, to help crunch numbers and analyse results on the many PropheZy assignments now emerging through the pipeline. Z/Yen welcomed all three in the conventional Z/Yen manner the other week – an unexpected and unforgettable initiation for some. One new face who wasn’t thus initiated is Rebecca & Neil Dawson’s son, Oscar, who arrived in mid July. Oscar should be good for awards in the fullness of time, though...

Up For It

…And speaking of awards, Z/Yen is delighted to report that the Charityshare venture, which Z/Yen has been spearheading for the past 18 months, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Charity Awards 2005 Best Use of Technology Award. Charityshare is a ground-breaking joint venture initiative between NSPCC and The Children’s Society to co-share IT services. Ian Harris has a canny knack of working on award-winning projects. This might have something to do with Ian’s canny and relentless knack for filling in nomination forms. And Ian would be the first to admit that most of the credit belongs to Mary O’Callaghan and the superb combined team from NSPCC & The Children’s Society; they actually did and are doing all the hard work on the venture. The awards ceremony is in late September. Meanwhile many other charities and government agencies are showing an interest in collaborative ventures along similar lines to Charityshare.

Best Execution

As we reported last time, we are currently working with Sun Microsystems, the London Stock Exchange and several leading investment banks on a research project based on the automation of Best Execution Compliance. We have been collecting data from a number of banks and adding this to pricing data from the London Stock Exchange. We anticipate that we will have some results next month but any banks who are feeling left out – there is still time to participate – please call Mark Yeandle.

Professor Mainelli

As previously announced, Michael Mainelli has been appointed Professor of Commerce at Gresham College, London. Michael will deliver six lectures a year over his three year tenure. The inaugural lecture is entitled “Danish Fairy Tales? From Andersen and the Copenhagen Consensus towards a Theory of Commerce”. This will be held on 19th September at at 6:00pm. Members of the public are very welcome – as of course are readers of Now & Z/Yen.

More Clients, More Interviews

Having completed our annual Cost per Trade benchmarks, Z/Yen is now starting off its annual round of interviews for the Operational Performance of Brokers surveys. Four surveys are being run this Autumn with two further planned for the spring. As we speak, interviewers, Nicole Avrami, Jonathan Davies, Rob Long, James Pitcher, Mark Yeandle and Jeremy Taylor are packing their bags and heading out to interview up to 240 investment managers and hedge funds in Europe, Asia and North America.

Z/Yen Now Benchmarks Cities

Well known for benchmarking investment banking costs, Z/Yen is now benchmarking whole cities. We have been commissioned by the Corporation of London to conduct research into the competitiveness of international financial centres including London, New York and Frankfurt. Part of this research is being conducted by an online survey – if you have not already participated, please do.