Expert view points

It is unusual for government to encourage activism, yet the EU’s newly revised Shareholder Rights Directive does just that. Once the directive is implemented across 27 member states later in 2019, it is likely that institutional shareholders will seek to influence company managements far more actively, including on topics related to corporate social...

Placing impact at the heart of business models, public tendering and financial analysis can help to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

To “do good by doing well” is an increasingly popular quest for investors. There is already significant empirical evidence that sustainable investing can lead to outperformance. And the signs are that digital analysis of how well companies behave, and the sustainability of their goods and services, might be about to confirm that with greater certainty.

In just 10 years, the green and social bond market has gone from nothing to become a part of mainstream finance. It has funded projects ranging from renewable energy, to low carbon buildings and energy efficiency. Yet the bulk of its activities have been in the more developed economies, while the area of greatest need is the developing world and specifically...

This year’s theme “Enabling the digital economy” resonates deeply with our experts from within Societe Generale’s Global Transaction Banking and Securities Services divisions and elsewhere across our bank. Every day is a new opportunity for our Group to take up challenges on behalf of our clients and other partners and make a positive contribution to building...

Eric de Gay de Nexon, Head of Strategy, Market Infrastructures and Regulation, Societe Generale Securities Services, on regulating the development of new technologies and the digital transition.

A relatively mature standard in Europe, momentum is building behind ISO 20022 globally as its benefits across a wide range of financial services activities become more apparent.

The correspondent banking industry in Europe is facing a number of challenging dynamics, not least declining revenues, mounting regulation and AML /KYC obligations and digitalisation, all of which are going to facilitate major changes in the world of cross-border payments. Societe Generale discusses the key trends impacting the European correspondent banking...

In today’s environment, the dynamics in the workforce are changing dramatically. Not only are business needs evolving rapidly requiring a change from traditional business models, technology changes are influencing the nature of jobs and our approach to work. It is also becoming more widely recognised that diversity and inclusion needs to be a HR priority to...

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is set to fundamentally alter the financial services world. Customer experiences will be enhanced, fraud detected and opportunities unearthed. However, at the moment the hype is overwhelming the potential and firms first need to have a better understanding of where the technology can have the greatest impact.

Although it has been well proven that cloud and application programming interfaces (API) can create cost effective, scaleable and innovative platforms, data security and operational transparency remain major hurdles to widespread adoption in the financial services community. To move forward, institutions must not only embrace a cloud focused culture from a...

Clearly, blockchain and more widely, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) still has plenty of wind in its sails. Billed from the outset as disruptive, it has promised to revolutionise the old-fashioned centralised applications in a cost effective and efficient manner.

Quantifying the business losses triggered by cyber-attacks is not for the fainthearted. Industry experts predict cyber-crime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, compared to $3 trillion in 2015 (1).

The scale of cyber-crime should not be downplayed. In fact, cyber-crime overtook asset theft as the most commonly perpetrated fraud against UK businesses for the first time ever in 2018, according to findings by PwC.