Letters: No time to call fin on fintech February 8, 2022 [RE: UK fintech investment hits £27.5bn, a sevenfold increase in just twelve months, yesterday] The sevenfold increase in UK fintech investment shouldn’t come as a surprise. If anything, the turmoil of the past year has highlighted the glaring need to move away from pre-pandemic infrastructure and embrace technology as the UK builds more efficient trading [...]
Letters: Blackrock, paper, scissors February 7, 2022 [Re: BlackRock enters the TikTok fray with ‘financial wellness’ account, Feb 4] Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset manager has decided to join Tik Tok, to give advice to people on “financial wellness”. This sort of performative “up with the kids” attitude is not unsurprising, but it is problematic. The more the big names jump onto [...]
Letters: Time to take my Wordle for it February 4, 2022 [Re:New York Times acquires Wordle for seven figure sum, Feb 1] The acquisition of Wordle by The New York Times’ is the culmination of the game’s meteoric rise. But how did we reach the point where a game made by one man for his fiancée was sold for millions of dollars? Wordle’s success can be [...]
Letters: A smart way to slice the cake February 3, 2022 [Re: Cake Box shares recovering after plummeting when blogger found accounts errors, Jan 22] Ever noticed a correlation between high profile “accounting errors” and the reality of a firm’s financial performance? Cake Box recently lost almost a fifth of its market value after “inconsistencies” in its annual report were spotted by a blogger, including an [...]
Letters: It’s not me, it’s U-kraine February 1, 2022 [Re: Ukraine: UK calls on European allies to put more pressure on Russia, Jan 28) On Friday, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) advised companies to bolster their defences amid fears cyber-attacks linked to tensions in Ukraine could spill outside of its borders. This was a welcome intervention on a very real threat. The [...]
Letters: Workforce for the future January 28, 2022 [Re: Andy Haldane comments on re-skilling the workforce, yesterday] Andy Haldane, head of the levelling up task force, said yesterday that the government must invest in a huge program of re-skilling the workforce. In the UK at the moment, vacancies are at a record high. At the same time, we see great swathes of graduates [...]
Letter: Time to fund our fraud office January 27, 2022 [Re: UK is losing fight against fraud as anti-corruption watchdogs are ‘under-resourced’, Jan 25] This week’s report from Spotlight on Corruption correctly highlights the need for the Serious Fraud Office to be properly funded if we are going to see action in the fight against corruption. The Serious Fraud office was established with the primary [...]
Letters: A four day week with no choice January 26, 2022 [Re: A four day week is no panacea, January 24] The pandemic has forced us to look again at employee wellbeing. Supporters of the four-day working week believe it could be a much needed boost to UK productivity. The idea is to achieve the same results in fewer hours. By working fewer days, it is [...]
Letters: How meta is the metaverse January 25, 2022 [Re: When tech giant becomes gaming giant: Microsoft buys Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard for a record £51bn, Jan 19] We have seen growth of over 300 per cent in PCT Patent filings for AR/VR technology over five years. This is all the more relevant with news of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which [...]
Letters: we must be clear on what’s green January 24, 2022 [Re: Bye bye to gas? No, it’s too soon, January 17] Last week’s letter by Richard Lum suggested the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change’s open letter to EU Member State representatives calling for gas to be excluded from the EU Taxonomy was “well-intentioned” but “very one-dimensional” and that investors should not be presented with [...]