---
title: 'How Bank Fraud Actually Works: A First-Hand Account'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlkB9JXME'
video_id: '_OBlkB9JXME'
date: 2026-08-05
duration_sec: 2916
---

# How Bank Fraud Actually Works: A First-Hand Account

> Source: [How Bank Fraud Actually Works: A First-Hand Account](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlkB9JXME)

## Summary

Nick Leeson, the former derivatives trader whose unauthorized trades caused the collapse of Barings Bank, recounts the events leading to the bank's failure. He details the creation of the infamous 88888 account, the systemic failures that allowed the fraud to continue, and the personal consequences including imprisonment and cancer.

### Key Points

- **Confession and Context** [00:00] — Leeson admits that his reckless trading caused the collapse of a 233-year-old merchant bank with losses of $1.2 billion. He describes his rise as an 'ascending star' and his move to Singapore in 1992.
- **The 88888 Account** [01:09] — Leeson explains the creation of the 88888 account to hide losses. The number 8 is considered lucky in Chinese folklore. He used this account to conceal mounting losses from his employers.
- **Early Warning Signs** [04:11] — In September 1992, Deloitte's audit found a $5 million discrepancy, but Leeson survived. By May 1993, losses reached $20 million, which he briefly recovered, but he then put the trade back into the 88888 account.
- **Trading Volume and System Failures** [06:28] — Trading volume increased from 2,000 to 20,000 contracts a day, overwhelming settlement systems. Trades took 14-15 hours to match, creating a backlog that Leeson exploited to hide his activities.
- **Lack of Risk Management** [07:25] — Barings had only one risk manager, unlike modern banks with thousands. This lack of oversight allowed Leeson to operate without challenge. He notes that double jobbing was common, and his trades were not properly scrutinized.
- **Funding and Capital Breaches** [13:09] — Barings sent Leeson £650 million, far exceeding the legal limit of 20% of the bank's capital (£50 million). They borrowed from Barclays and Citibank and issued a £100 million bond to fund his positions.
- **Regulatory Failure** [15:03] — The Bank of England, the regulator, failed to act on breaches. The Board of Banking Supervision later found that the person responsible was 'too far down' the chain to be effective.
- **Awards and Recognition** [18:38] — Leeson received awards for highest customer volume on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange, but 90% of that volume was from his illegal 88888 account. The irony was not noticed by his superiors.
- **The Kobe Earthquake and Escalation** [20:20] — After the Kobe earthquake in January 1995, the Nikkei fell, increasing losses to over £800 million. Leeson created a fake OTC option and fabricated an audit confirmation to cover the losses.
- **Discovery and Flight** [22:43] — On February 23, 1995, a reconciliation exposed the 88888 account. Leeson fled Singapore with his wife, eventually being arrested in Frankfurt and extradited to Singapore.
- **Imprisonment in Singapore** [29:47] — Leeson served time in Tanah Merah prison, a maximum-security facility. He describes the harsh conditions, including 23-hour lockdowns, poor food, and gang violence.
- **Cancer Diagnosis** [35:18] — While in prison, Leeson was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He underwent surgery to remove a 10cm tumor and refused chemotherapy until allowed to receive treatment as a day patient.
- **Collapse and Aftermath** [37:23] — Barings was sold to ING for £1 on February 27, 1995. Leeson was released in July 1999 after serving about four years. He later wrote 'Rogue Trader' and became a speaker on compliance and governance.
- **Modern Banking and Lessons** [42:42] — Leeson notes that modern banks have better risk management and real-time data, but niche areas still lack oversight. He cites recent scandals like Archegos and FTX as examples of continued systemic failures.
- **Final Advice** [47:10] — Leeson emphasizes the importance of communication and asking for help. He regrets not asking for help at 25, viewing it as a sign of weakness in the 1990s banking culture.

### Conclusion

Nick Leeson's story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked risk-taking and systemic failures in financial institutions. His experience highlights the need for robust oversight, communication, and personal accountability.

## Transcript

My reckless trading, unfortunately, resulted in the collapse of a 233 year old merchant bank with losses of $1.2 billion.
And this is how crime works. I needed the most money, the most margin. I was very much the ascending star within the organization for a period of time,
but then had a very spectacular fall from grace. I had the opportunity to move to Singapore, in 1992.
It was very much a new business. Barings has a historic reputation amongst banking in the UK. It was one of the oldest merchant banks, if not the oldest.
that period were with other financial institutions. So big fund managers, other banks, it wasn't a bank where you would have normal people having accounts making investments.
So your trades for the day, you know, those have all got account numbers The 88888 account is the, you know, the infamous account where I kept any losses. eight is a lucky number in Chinese folklore.
captured in Singapore and then reported back to the UK. 2000 people or 1500 people in a trading floor.
So it's very easy to think you've got one person's eyeline, that behind that person's eyeline as well. They might be price discrepancies.
So all of those stuff has to be reconciled during the course of the day. So that's where the 88888 account was born. And after a period of time, London said they didn't want to see all of the detail.
So it's on one of those occasions, late at night, 4:00 in the morning, you could see that she'd passed the trading correctly.
who was the head of the operations department in Singapore. Ask me to quantify it. And he asked me to refer it back to Andrew Bayliss.
And, would have understood it, very, very quickly. That's probably, you know, 2:00 in the morning UK time.
So then I'm in this massive dilemma, you know, do I wait for the market on the market open or do I cut that immediately, follow through on this process or do I take a chance and see
if the market gets back to the level that we were, that the position is? And I've got, you know, 4 or 5 hours And unfortunately, what I chose to do is the latter.
and definitely not a coach, but throughout the time I was at Barings, So when it came to my turn to to see if I wanted to
it was far too easy because I'd seen so many people And that's the, you know, the first really bad mistake
that I, that I made in my business career and it's, you know, unfortunately, over time, it, just grew and grew and grew. there's a year end audit in September of 1992.
Deloitte's are coming in to do, the audit. There is a $5 million discrepancy in the year end accounts. and somehow I managed to survive for a little bit longer.
By May of 1993, the loss is $20 million. And then in May of 1993, we have the most perfect expiry in the options market. I make all of the 20 million back, and I have a quarter of 1 million pound
I transfer it to somebody trading book in Tokyo and genuinely go home that weekend thinking, that's great, I can start again now. I was 25 when I moved to Singapore.
The people that worked for me were my friends. So on the Monday morning You know, as difficult as the previous seven, eight, nine months have been,
I very stupidly put the trade back into the 88888 account. I probably think I can do it again. the markets are moving aggressively lower on the wrong side of the market.
I think by the end of 1994, from London, from the Treasury Department in London.
So the loss has to be fairly close to that number. It's very noisy. It's very boisterous.
Before I arrived in Singapore, there was only one main product, which was the Eurodollar, which is also traded in Chicago. the US, Europe and the different time locations.
it only really kicked off in the last year or so in Singapore. you went from trading 2000 contracts a day to trading 20,000 contracts.
the Singapore international, well, I think everybody wasn't ready for it. The rule of thumb is that it takes about 30 minutes to match a trade We both put in a little trade ticket, a docket, one to buy, one to sell.
You put those into the, the system on the trading floor, the Simex system. And you hopefully they those trades match, so they need to match us And if it doesn't match,
because the settlement systems weren't able to deal with it on the floor it was taking 14, 15 hours to match the trade.
for that period of time and you've got all of these tickets that are flying around getting lost, and all sorts of stuff going on. So that was the backlog that was being created, during that period.
in 1995, we'd only just taken on an internal audit team. As ridiculous as that sounds, we had a risk manager. So if you go into Citibank or somewhere now, there would be
3000, 5000 people working in, risk management. But at Barings at the time, the risk manager So you would find people double jobbing when I was trading and people that I knew
would have been trading back in the 90s with trade and then would tell people that it had been done, whereas now it's part of the process.
is a yeah, it's quite a controlled environment. The Porsches, the penthouses, the yachts wasn't the life that I was living. You know, it was much more family orientated.
You know, you'd go out as you would in any walk of life and you, you know, you'd enjoy yourself for the weekends, you'd go to concerts and the like. I think Singapore is a country that doesn't have a drug culture.
So you didn't encounter anything like that. outraging female modesty and stuff like that. So there are things that you can get away with a little bit,
on Wolf of Wall Street or one of those type of movie. When I moved to Singapore, I took a pay cut And so I think my salary probably was 50,000 pounds at the time.
Obviously, the salary is increased quite significantly over that period. You know, it was I think my smallest bonus at Barings was a year's salary.
I think what bonuses do is they create a lot of short term-ism. So people are trying to hit numbers so their bonus gets paid and,
if you look back at some of the reporting that I was doing I think as long as it reflected a profit, The problem was that I was the outlier on pretty much every metric you can imagine.
I had the biggest position and all of that should have attracted more attention. the money that was being made. And if you were reporting a profit, it tended not to be investigated that much.
figure bonuses in the senior management roles at that time. Barings was a charitable trust. If you're a charitable trust, you can pay bigger bonuses than you can
in, in a corporate entity at that particular times. and it did a lot of good. But it was also a vehicle that enabled Barings to pay huge bonuses to their staff.
But there were a couple of other episodes, in Singapore, or in Asia at that time, there was, a guy who worked for Barings in Hong Kong
who was sacked for, misrepresenting the profit on his trades. every time I stepped over the mark, there was never any push back. It was very Jekyll and Hyde.
I knew what the reality was in terms of the trades. and look at the statements and see the number in front of me and, and a number of other emotions as well.
So you knew roughly what it was, out onto the trading floor and appear confident and get involved, and still you're trying to manipulate the situation
And, you know, everybody thought that every time they traded with me, And they probably did because I was manipulating the markets But ultimately, as the market collapsed,
I was the one that lost far more money than anybody else. So there's a you know, there is always that facade. where your wife thinks that everything's okay.
She's enjoying herself in Singapore, and you've got to maintain that as well. So you're balancing all of these, but it's all a tissue of lies, you know, underneath it all, you know, there's there's no stability.
The parallels that people draw with gambling, I think anybody who works in the investment or financial markets always shies away from the association.
The, you know, the doubling down is one of those when they're gambling, they start to chase their losses.
And so there was a lot of chasing in this situation as well. And I'm sure if you speak to any bookmaker, they, they make most of their money from people that chase their losses.
So a Treasury Department that would look after the funding, So I would send emails on a regular basis asking Treasury for more money.
there would be an intercompany balance between the two parts of the organization. that it was getting more and more difficult.
Over this period, the capital base of the bank was only 250 million pound. So it was a small bank, but yet they sent me 650 million pounds. They were borrowing it from Barclays, they were borrowing from Citibank.
And they were feeding me in Singapore to continue going with the process. And then at the beginning of 1995, it became even more difficult for them. Obviously, they'd bypassed some sort of credit limit.
They went to the stock market and they issued a bond for 100 million pound. So from a governance perspective and looking at things holistically, you know, they weren't testing or challenging what was going on at the time.
You've got a small bank, so 250 million pounds worth of capital. The legal limit you can lend to a subsidiary is 20% of the bank's capital. So that's 50 million, 13 times in breach of that limit,
that are funding my legal positions. the capital base of the bank as well. So these are, you know, when you look back and you look at the sort of numbers,
it's it's outlandish that it was allowed to get to that sort of level. The regulator at the time was the Bank of England. that would detail how much money was being lent to Singapore.
But the Board of Banking Supervision, which met after the collapse of Barings, asked the Bank of England what they were doing.
And the person who worked in that role who was looking at the breaches and this is actually in the report, it says that it was too far down So it's like, you know, when you look back at Barings, it's
a systemic breakdown in the system that includes regulators, auditors and, you know, so many different people who really weren't doing their jobs. You know, my incompetence and negligence is very much at the forefront
And, you know, there's no excuse, for that. But I, you know, I accept full responsibility and accountability. a bit more aware of what was going on.
Obviously, it's a bit of a confidence trick in terms of if they would ask me about my responses, even if it was complete and utter rubbish. we had a squawk
box in Singapore where I would pass orders to Osaka, which is where the Nikkei 225 orders would be transacted in Japan. because my position limit was 250, lots of the Nikkei 225,
So a trade for 5000 contracts, a trade for 10,000 contracts and many of those on the same day, so clearly in breach of the position
that I was allowed to hold and many times in breach. was that the settlement system was grouping together trades at the same price, which is complete and utter rubbish.
He couldn't trade that sort of volume at that particular price, but He would have found Osaka and said, how did you receive the order? Everything would have been exposed at that point, because the orders
would have been by 5000 at the market, by 10,000 at the market, and fairly in fairly rapid order as well. But because he didn't understand how the business fitted together,
who went to really good schools, really good universities. But, you know, however much knowledge you have if you don't understand That allowed me to
So you go from thinking it's, I'm not going to get exposed this minute because they haven't done it yet. I've got a day or I've got two days, and then you think in terms of weeks
you think I've got a month to correct the situation and still then asking the right question, so you get a little bit more confident. And in Singapore would only pick it up on the last day of the month.
So it's still a load of options. I'd receive the premium that would take the account balance line down to zero, I was able to continue this ad infinitum or until the bank
ran out of money, which unfortunately is the result in this case. starts to build through 1994.
You know, there's lots of things that are happening on the success side of it. on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange for the highest customer volume. 90% of that is for my legal 88888 account.
It's something that's feted by everybody within the organization. this award is for your five eights account for the illegal trading account.
And again, you know, how do people accept that we're doing this volume of trading or they, they look at the bona fide level of trading It just doesn't it doesn't correlate.
to help me receive those awards or be a party. The hired out Grand Central Station, New York, to have a party because I was in the bar downstairs getting drunk.
They it was probably, you know, that was probably above you know, juggling at that particular point, there was all of these people having a conference about the money that we were making in Singapore.
about what my bonus is going to be, is half a million pounds enough? and you know that the pressure is starting to build.
Can't bring myself to announce what's happened over this, I, over this previous period and put my hand up and be honest about what's going on. I'm in Ireland at the end of 1994, and on the very last day of the month,
we haven't done anything with the 88888 account. And so I said, just pass a one sided journal entry, credit the account, But I didn't expect to go back to Singapore.
You know, my wife, my family and tell them what's going on. There's an earthquake in Kobe. The market start to fall even quicker, which means that position is increasing
And the losses, you know, 650 million pounds. So probably 820, 840 million at that particular point.
So I've got to come up with an excuse. And that's what becomes known as the SLK receivable, where I'm trading an OTC option which I have no authority to do.
So it's not a small OTC transaction. And then I have to manufacture an audit confirmation And OTC transaction is an over-the-counter transaction,
Deloitte wanted an audit confirmation about the amount of money, But what they did do is they asked me to seek out
the audit reconciliation, which isn't something that would happen these days. or I may have done it from my desk in Singapore, but, the audit confirmation needed a signature from somebody.
It's Spear, Leeds and Kellogg, so I managed to, get a signature from somewhere and really just pasted it onto the document where it was required. Went home to my apartment in Anguilla Park
in Singapore and faxed it to the auditors. of the piece of paper, it says: "from Nick and Lisa." There's only one, inscription
on the piece of paper, and it's from my house. And yet they still accepted that and didn't ask any more questions. throughout the whole story is quite astounding.
that audit confirmation would break every rule in that. And I'm just trying to keep going through this process. On the 23rd of February, 1995, somebody came to me with a reconciliation
of the 88888 account why a reconciliation should be done every single day. Morgan Stanley, I used to do the reconciliations myself. Nobody did those reconciliations for a two and a half, three year period.
But in February, at the beginning of February 1995, London, obviously concerned about the amount of money that we had in Singapore, the lack of, the the amount of reporting
They sent a settlement person, Tony Railton, out to, Singapore to look at what we were doing. But still, it took him 20 days to do a reconciliation.
We only have two accounts, London and Tokyo. International Monetary Exchange, and there's a huge discrepancy.
And so when he confronts you with it in black and white, there's no excuse, There's nothing that's going to wash at that particular point. and you go back to home, you pack a bag and you get out of Singapore and you're
you're really not aware of quite how disastrous or calamitous I didn't know that I had twice or two and a half times the capital base of the bank with me in Singapore, and
and then work out where your next move is from there. Yes, I knew there was going to be a considerable loss,
So I thought, well, I didn't think, I didn't really think about it, but you would have expected the, the, the loss was, something that they were able to consume.
the plan was to go to Phuket and meet up with somebody who worked on the trading floor just to try and work out how bad, everything was.
so the only place we could get to that afternoon was a place called So that's where we flew to. just trying to work out quite how bad the situation was.
Went down into the local newsagent in the hotel we were staying in Bank collapses." So that kind of hits you full in the face and you realize quite how bad it is.
You know, that's starting to build, trying to pretend to be normal, Obviously, my wife is more aware of what's going on now than she was, but you still don't really want to talk about it too much.
and try and get back to Europe? So after a day or so we had to change hotel? Obviously the story is everywhere on the TVs
and in the newspapers, so you're a bit worried about being caught there. So we're going to a more local, hotel down in downtown, but we're trying to work out where we can get back to and the only flight
that's going out any time soon, leaves from Kota Kinabalu goes to Brunei. From Thailand, it goes to Abu Dhabi and then from Abu Dhabi, it goes to Frankfurt. No reason or rationale for flying to Frankfurt.
it was the first European destination and obviously it was closer to the UK. Didn't really expect to get through passport control in in Malaysia, expected to be stopped and detained there.
We had to wait for 8 or 9 hours in Brunei, then sort of made our way and above the boarding gate there's a TV and you know, this is the only story
that's on, on repeat throughout the whole whole period. recognizing you, which just about managed to do. You sit down and they give you an out newspapers, as they used to do in the day,
So, yeah, trying to put blankets over your face and silly sort of stuff. And what was happening at the same time is the travel
agent obviously had recognized me and had reported that she'd sold a ticket to, to to us, and she'd reported that to somebody. So now Interpol are looking for us.
the police came and arrested me off of the plane You know, you're just facing the next hurdle.
Part of that was getting my wife sent back to the UK. The original charges said that we were traveling on false passports, The challenge was removed for my wife at the time.
You've been moved to a different prison in Hurst in Frankfurt. You know, you're kept on 24 hour lockdown for a week, which is tough. you know, emotional process of, of losing your freedom.
It's the time of the Balkan state's rule breaking down. So it was, you know, it was a dangerous place. And it's your first time in that sort of population,
You're going through this constant turmoil about what your sentence is going to be. The speculation in the English media is that it could be up to 84 years You know,
we threatened to go to the European Court of Justice to, to until we were eventually willing and able And we're not negotiating with the Singaporeans.
They want to take me back immediately. You know, specimen charges. I have to pay a certain amount of money to the Singaporean police
have to make a formal apology to the people of Singapore. in prison. And, you know, Germany was tough, dangerous.
But, Singapore was tougher, probably less dangerous, but a much tougher regime.
prison was Tanah Merah, so it was maximum security. It's modeled off of some sort of military regime. good morning, sir, and, and things like that.
I'm sure you don't see them in too many English prisons, to be honest with you. Everybody's a triad gang member. Other English inmates who might have had a drug offense or something.
And the boredom is unbelievable. Yeah. Locked up for 23 hours a day. So your daily regime would be somebody waking you
So it would be three pieces of bread, and a cup of tea or a cup of coffee. At lunchtime, you'd go out into the yard for an hour. Then you go back to the cell, do a little bit more exercise.
So it either be chicken, a fish which was quite small and had, lots of bones and the head on it still. Or mutton,
you know, some fairly old, pretty rank sort of lamb and rice, which you're not used to eating three times a day. And then your dinner would arrive at about 4:00 in the afternoon
And there's nothing in the cell there. There's enough room for three of you. And there's a, you know, a hole in the, in the,
in one corner where you go to the toilet and there's a small barrier If there wasn't one advantage of Singapore because there was so much control over what goes on, it's fairly safe.
It's really brutal. when something does happen and there would be gang clashes. you know, there would be weapons that would be used that they'd,
that either brought back from workshops or they made themselves The guards would come in, commando guards with, full battle gear on with big sticks, and they would start hitting people over the head.
Unless you were on the floor holding your head in your hands. But it maintained a degree of safety within the prison, You know, I had one sort of disturbance.
but I used to kick and I was a, when I worked in the city. or so that was required, in that, you know, I used to get a lot of letters,
so you would get the letters Monday to Friday, not the weekends. that you've got a 1 in 5 chance of, of getting a letter that day.
So it's an improvement. about different things and break it down into smaller periods. But you could look forward to those.
So it's all about reframing how you think about things in order to survive. Whilst I was in prison in Singapore, they used to regularly change my cellmates Maybe so they would change my cell mates on a fairly regular basis.
And, one time I'd had a couple of Malay inmates that were getting on quite well. They were from different gangs, but they, they shared a religion, and and do that sort of stuff, and there was no reason to change them.
They bring you out of the cell. Anyway, it's not a great deal to empty. And then they said they were changing my cell mates.
So I said, look, I'm not going back in the cell then. for my disobedience, that they'd send me to the punishment cells.
The door never opens. They turned the lights off during the day, and they turned them on at night. But. Yeah.
And your food is given through a cat flap in the door, so it's a lot tougher. So you literally can walk up and down, that's it. or 755 times, that's an hour.
So I went back down to the general area. And then about an hour or so later, I was called for a visit, and it was the British vice consul who was there.
you know, I've lost a bit of weight, didn't look particularly well. I'd been in the punishment cells and, you know, starting to get a bit of pain So I went to see the doctor in the prison.
My red cell blood count was low, so he gave me some iron tablets So I'd go back and the iron tablets would arrive every day. They took me to a hospital.
And the doctor who came down found the lump straight away. So he said, I'm going to need to send you to the ward upstairs. There's big double doors, and you're chained to the bed, so
One day when I was there, you know, they'd done a couple of investigations by this stage that decided that it's cancer. curled around the bowl in the toilet bowl.
Just because the tumor had got so big that it pushed onto my lung and collapsed my lung, so that I was incapacitated in the toilet. They remove the tumor that was ten centimeters by seven centimeters.
I had 38 staples in my stomach, and then, they after a couple of days, they took me back to the prison. And then they said that they wanted to give me chemotherapy, inside the prison.
But, you know, I refused the chemotherapy on the basis that I wasn't going They were showing me the rules and regulations that you have to go. But then eventually they made a decision that I could go and,
just be like a day patient, and go and get the chemo, for five days, five continuous days, and that would be three weeks off.
And then, you know, that and then I was released in July of 1999. Everybody gets a standard one third remission.
with, with those rules. the sort of chronology from that sort of point would have been the 24th.
couldn't trade any more, and they were running around, trying to do their best to rescue it. That would have continued over the weekend, 25th and 26th of February
And on the Monday, which is the 27th of February, bank was ultimately sold for a pound to IAG. I think the Barings name is still out there in the US.
Barings Asset Management was never taken over by ING, said. has always been around since the collapse of the bank.
As to the question of whether, no bank is too big to fail, I mean, I think banks are an important part of,
And there probably are 1 or 2 that are too big to fail because they're involved in so many different transactions at so many levels.
I mean, I think Lehman's is probably the obvious example. What ensued after the collapse of Lehman's was a global financial collapse because there was fear, there was panic, and lehmans
were involved in so many different transactions at different levels. It was all in Singapore, it was all in one product, which was the Nikkei 225.
And what you find now is that a lot of within the hedge fund industry. There were a few of the directors that were banned from holding,
You know, I'm often asked if I think that's just. You know, they didn't do anything criminal. The only thing that they're guilty of is, you know, a fairly high level
of stupidity to allow it to happen, you know, and they've got to I think that's the most damning thing that they have to do in relation to, to their involvement in the collapse of Barings.
And, but, you know, I, I'm front and center, fully responsible, totally accountable for everything that happened.
I signed an injunction for 100 million pounds whilst I was at Heathrow Airport from the liquidators, and then was spirited away in a car and then slowly from there,
you know, you kind of have to get back into life and, you're not quite institutionalized, but you're, you know, you're not used to making decisions, you know, on a, on a, on a very basic basis.
I wasn't used to wearing shoes because, you know, you walk around barefoot in Singapore for nearly four years whilst you're in prison. rear climate, climate ization.
Everybody was going to work, on a Monday. So it was important that I put some structure back in my life. So I did a psychology degree for three years in Middlesex.
We remarried and moved to Ireland. In those first months and years, the liquidators, were paying me a monthly stipend to, continue to help them.
But also that was based on me needing more medical advice. So, you know, I used to say to the liquidators, And they said, well, we want half of what you're earning.
And that was, you know, regardless of where the job was. There's one in Holland that went to the liquidators. that went to the liquidators and then given the opportunity
to do so after DNA speaking, I always used to be quite introvert. from being extrovert, so wasn't used to that sort of environment. But, you know, I've been doing it for 26 years now, so I've got quite good at it.
And I talk about, keynote, conferences as well and give addresses. compliance and the importance of corporate governance. That's kind of that it's moved
slightly to the side of that as well, that we look at some scams And we try to, repatriate those funds. We have a number of cases with the Financial Ombudsman at the moment.
I wrote the book Rogue Trader whilst I was in prison in Germany. Sir David Frost made the movie. Within the movie.
So it's it's it's accurate. You know, people driving around in Porsches in Singapore, it didn't happen. It didn't happen.
But, you know, that's, that's the way movies get made us both so. too much at risk from from people going rogue these days.
The quality of people in those roles is so much more superior than it ever You've got, you know, real time data that is helping the situation as well.
The problem is that you still have very niche areas that aren't getting the amount of, surveillance and scrutiny that they should. So if you look at the more recent cases of financial scandal,
you know, there's one at Macquarie Bank, which was during the Covid period, But still, you know, it didn't get to more than 30 million. a set of unique circumstances around Covid and working from home.
Bill Hwang and the losses at Archegos Capital, part of the family So it's been looked at and,
you know, the single stock exposure that he had was huge. Again, the lack of oversight and the lack of communication I think was quite shocking during that one.
which is in the crypto space, where they're trying to avoid all sorts of regulation, very, you know, systemic breakdown, kind of like Barings. you know, the regulators, if there was any during that period.
One and he was you know, he was obviously going out and supporting in the US and giving out lots of gifts during that sort of period as well. Yet behind it was just, House of cards.
I think it's very difficult to suggest or predict For the financial markets, there's a lot of, spread betting and CFD firms that have been growing, over the years.
I don't think it says it's regulated as tough as maybe it should be. there's some unsavory stuff that goes on in that area, that the trade it the banks have it.
Probably at the moment, you know, they've got the right number of people working in compliance, the right number of people working in, risk management. And there's an awful lot of oversight and control of everything that goes on.
I think the worry from a mainstream financial marketplace is possibly deregulation and what deregulation looks like. You know, it was a it was a during a period of deregulation that,
you know, I popped up, to the forefront of everything that was going on. you would think that it's going to be better managed than it was in the past. But if the government are managing it, you know, maybe not.
I think the the industry over the last 20, The the degree of regulation, the degree of control has just And that takes people away from the real challenges
I'm not convinced that AI is the answer to that. I think technology has a huge part to play in everything that goes on But, you know, delivering not more false positives is
I think it's already an issue where they're dealing, The controls need to be continually improved. I think crypto is an area that that could be improved upon.
I know they are resistant to regulation and to change, but I think there are so many episodes in the world of banking where there has been poor oversight, poor controls and and scandal that I think they can learn.
one of one of the It doesn't matter whether it's finance, health or anything else that's going on
You know, I think the communication is the most important thing So, you know, I always encourage certainly my children to ask for help and advice. So the one thing I didn't do, and if I had, I would have been surrounded
Whereas I, at 25 years old, saw asking for help and advice as a sign of weakness was more the culture, around 1990s banking.
you know, things would have been very different. Yeah. loud and clear, is that, you know, it's easy to get another job.
So, you know, it's important that you always do the right thing. You.
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