Insights

What you will find here

Most bank publishing exists to fill a content calendar. This does not. We write when a rate decision changes what savers should do, when a payment rail behaves differently, or when a client question turns out to be one that hundreds of people are quietly asking.

Three kinds of thing live here. Research, where we look at data on UK deposits, payments and currency markets and say what we think it means. Case studies, which are anonymised accounts of work we have actually done — including the parts that went badly. And guides, which are the practical material we found ourselves writing repeatedly in emails until it made more sense to publish it.

Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and none of it is a substitute for advice about your own circumstances. Where we hold a view, we say so plainly rather than hiding it behind hedging.

Research

We publish periodic analysis of the things that actually move money for our clients: where UK deposit rates are going and why the headline base rate is a poor guide to what savers receive; how sterling, euro and dollar corridors are pricing over different time horizons; and how the payments infrastructure — Faster Payments, SEPA, SWIFT gpi — is changing what a transfer costs and how long it takes.

We are explicit about the limits of the data. Deposit pricing is opaque because banks do not publish what they pay to individual segments, and industry averages hide enormous variation. Where a number is an estimate, we label it as one. Where a dataset stops telling us something useful, we say that rather than filling the gap with confidence.

Recent themes: the widening gap between instant-access and fixed-term rates; what the return of the fixed-term deposit says about household expectations; and why the cost of an international payment is rarely the fee you were quoted.

Case studies

Anonymised accounts of work we have completed. Each one covers what the client needed, what made it difficult, how we structured the answer, and — the part most firms omit — what we would do differently with hindsight.

They cover the situations that recur: consolidating a family office across seven accounts and three currencies into a payments policy the trustees could actually sign; moving a trading business off a high-street bank when its FX costs were quietly eating a fifth of margin on overseas sales; and setting up staged payment release for a client who had been targeted by an invoice-redirection fraud.

Details are changed enough that no client is identifiable. Everything that matters about the mechanics is left intact, because a sanitised case study that omits the difficulty teaches nothing.

Guides

Practical material, written to be used rather than admired. What documents to have ready before opening a business account and why identity checks take longer for companies with overseas shareholders. How to choose between instant access and a fixed term when you do not know your timeline. What a clearance code is, who issues it, and why we release larger payments in stages.

The security guides are the ones we would most like people to read. The fraud that costs our clients money is almost never a technical breach of the bank — it is someone being persuaded to authorise a payment themselves. Understanding how that persuasion works is worth more than any password advice.

If there is something you think we should write about, tell your banker. A good number of these started as a client question we could not answer briefly.

A note on how we publish

Everything here is written internally. We do not commission ghostwritten thought leadership, and we do not publish research that is really an advertisement for a product we happen to be selling that quarter.

Where a piece touches on regulated advice, it carries the appropriate caveats — not as legal decoration, but because the difference between information and advice is a real one and it matters which you are reading.