Financial

Hiring Continues In The Middle East Wealth Management Bonanza

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Despite chilly global credit markets, the Middle Eastern wealth management arena is a recruitment hotspot. Firms are busily hiring senior executives to spearhead new wealth management teams. For example, Merrill Lynch recently appointed Mazin Al-Shakarchi as a financial advisor covering Qatar from the Bahrain office. HSBC Bank Middle East has appointed Walid Boustany to the role of executive director, strategic investments, Middle East & North Africa. He will be responsible for HSBC’s strategic planning across the region. Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, has appointed Fadi Abuali as co-head of its Middle East private wealth management business, alongside current head Farid Pasha.

And there is more: the Central Bank of Bahrain has approved Douglas Hansen-Luke as Robeco’s new chief executive for the Middle East. Mr Hansen-Luke formerly worked in senior positions for ABN Amro Asset Management in Asia, Europe and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain-based Ithmaar Bank has appointed Shaikh Salman bin Ahmad Al Khalifa as managing director, group business development.

The rash of appointments seen in recent years will continue, barring an unlikely collapse in demand for wealth management, Professor Amin Rajan, chief executive of Create-Research, a UK consultancy on the investment management industry, told WealthBriefing.

Wealth managers are going into the Middle East in a big way, said Professor Rajan. This is a high-margin business to be in as banks get fees right along the value chain, he said. But although the region is lucrative, making money is not easy. Local investors typically punish poor investment performance quickly – often far faster than is the case with European or US clients, said Professor Rajan.

The real issue is to understand the client mindset. Client money [in the Middle East] isn’t sticky at all. When performance is bad they ask for a rebate, which is how it should be. If [wealth managers] can survive in the Middle East, they can survive anywhere, he added.

Barclays Wealth, for example, has every intention of doing more than just survive in the region. As an illustration of its ambitions, Barclays is moving into a new 14,000 square feet office in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which will be a hub for the firm’s operations in the region. Operating currently in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Barclays Wealth is also planning to make its Doha Qatar office operational this year.

Barclays Wealth leadership believes that the Middle East is a core area of growth. A substantial investment in human resources and capabilities and a rigorous expansion plan will lead to a substantial increase in the scope of operations, Soha Nashaat, managing director, head of Middle East, North Africa & Turkey for Barclays Wealth, told WealthBriefing.
Like Professor Rajan, Ms Nashaat says wealth management firms entering the Middle East from outside the region must understand the local culture if they are to make a success of their business. For example, more than 70 per cent of businesses are family-owned, which requires managers to forge long-term connections.

Wealth managers must understand and cater to the regional trends such as the dominance of family offices, Ms Nashaat said. Investors tend to be intolerant of risk and hold a high proportion of assets in cash and in offshore locations, she added.

Middle Eastern clients put great stress on strong relationships with investment advisors and dislike high turnover in staff, a factor that wealth managers must consider in their staff recruitment and retention plans, Stuart Crocker, chief executive, Emirates Platform and Southern Gulf States, HSBC Private Bank told WealthBriefing.

People don’t like seeing relationship managers moving on every two or three years to other banks, he said. His own bank, part of the HSBC banking group, serves clients both from local Middle Eastern locations as well as from its teams of specialists in Geneva.

The general background for wealth managers is certainly favourable. The investable assets of HNW individuals will rise by 50 per cent between 2006 and 2010, according to Barclays Wealth data.

The number of HNW individuals rose by 11.9 per cent in 2006 from a year before, according to the latest Merrill Lynch/Capgemini World Wealth Report issued last June. Wealth management intermediaries have only started to manage a significant share of assets in the region. Research from Zurich International Life, for example, reveals that expats living in the Middle East prefer to rely on their own judgment or friends and family when purchasing financial products. The survey showed that fewer than one in ten expats would enlist a financial advisor, either in their country of domicile or residence, to help them make the financial decisions. Financial advisors have a vast untapped market to go for.

While researchers like PricewaterhouseCoopers have warned that wealth management firms face a skills bottleneck, hiring staff for Middle Eastern slots is being helped by a benign tax regime and attractive pay packages.

Private bankers in tax-free Dubai earn 25 per cent more than their peers in Geneva and almost 40 per cent more than colleagues in London, according to a recent survey by Dubai-based headhunter Dunn Consultancy FZ-LLC.

Excluding bonuses, private bankers in Dubai with at least 10 years experience receive an average salary of $276,500 with allowances, compared with pre-tax earnings of $221,900 in Geneva and $199,100 in London, it found.

The economics of wealth management in the Middle East certainly look compelling. For the time being at least, the toughest challenge for players in the region is keeping up with the pace.

The Importance Of Excel In The Workplace

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Excel is perhaps the most crucial computer software program used in the workplace today. That’s why so many workers and prospective employees are necessary to learn Excel in get to enter or remain at work.

From the viewpoint of the employer, particularly those in the field of information systems, the usage of Excel as an end-user computing tool is essential. Not only are many business professionals using Excel to do everyday functional tasks in the workplace, an increasing number of employers count on Excel for decision help.http://shuangyuan45.blog.com, http://robertandy.livejournal.com/, http://katharinealva.blog.com//a>

In general, Excel dominates the spreadsheet product industry using a market share estimated with 90 percent. Excel 2007 has the proportions for spreadsheets as high as a million rows as a result of 16, 000 columns, enabling the user to import and help massive amounts of data and achieve faster calculation performance than in the past.

Outside the workplace, Excel is broad use for everyday problem solving.

Let’s say you will have a home office. You may use Excel to calculate sales tax on the purchase, calculate the cost of a trip by car, produce a temperature converter, calculate the price of pizza per square inch and do analysis of inputted data. You can track your financial troubles, income and assets, determine your debt to income ratio, calculate your net worth, and employ this information to prepare for the process of applying for a mortgage on a brand-new house. The personal uses with regard to Excel are almost as endless for the reason that business uses for that software – and an Excel tutorial delves into the practical uses of the course for personal and business use.

The use of spreadsheets on computers is not really new. Spreadsheets, in electronic form, have been available since before the introduction with the personal computer. Forerunners to Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 were packages including VisiCalc, developed and modeled to the accountant’s financial ledger. Due to the fact 1987, spreadsheet programs have been impacting the business world. Along the way, computerized spreadsheets have turn into a pervasive and increasingly effective tool for comparative data analysis throughout the world.

Today, end users employ Excel to develop and modify spreadsheets and to author web internet pages with links and complex formatting specifications. They create macros and scripts. While some of these programs are small, one-shot calculations, many are much much more critical and affect significant financial decisions and company transactions.

Widely used by businesses, service agencies, you are not selected groups, private sector organizations, scientists, students, educators, training companies, researchers, journalists, accountants while others, Microsoft Excel has turn into a staple of end customers and business professionals.

The beauty of Excel is that it can be used as a receiver of workplace or business data, or as a calculator, a decision support tool, a data converter or even a display spreadsheet for info interpretation. Excel can create a chart or graph, operate with Mail Merge functions, import data from the internet, create a concept place and sequentially rank information by importance.

Excel offers new data analysis and visualization tools that assist in analyzing information, spotting trends and accessing information more easily than previously. Using conditional formatting with rich data display plans, you can evaluate and illustrate important trends and highlight exceptions with colored gradients, data bars together with icons.

Indeed, Excel can be customized to perform such a wide variety of functions that many establishments can’t operate without the idea. Excel training has become mandatory in many workplaces; in fact, computer software training is a must for any workplace trying to keep up with the times.

Let’s claim you’re an employer with 97 workers, 17 involving whom called in hurt today, and you want to know the percentage represented as a result of absentees. Excel can do that. You can learn Stand out and use it to determine the ratio of male to help female employees, the percentage of minorities relating to the payroll, and the ranking of each worker by compensation package amount, including the percentages of that package according to pay for and benefits. You can use Excel to keep an eye on production by department, information that may assist you in future development options. You can create even more spreadsheets to track info on vendors and customers while maintaining an ongoing inventory of product stock.

Let’s say you want to know your business production vs . cost. You don’t ought to be a math wiz – you just need to learn Excel. Excel allows you to input all of the data, analyze it, sort it consistent with your customized format, and display the outcome with color, shading, backgrounds, icons and other gimmicks that provide time-saving assistance in later locating precisely the information desired. If this spreadsheet is designed for presentation purposes, Excel helps you put it together ordinary visually appealing way that data may seem to help pop and sparkle.

The single most important things an employer may complete is learn Excel – it is among the most most essential tools of the workplace.

Excel and Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, registered in your U. S. and other countries. Lotus is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the U. S. and/or many other countries.

Company Secretary Courses And Subjects

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Company Secretary Courses

The Company Law Board initiated a course in the year 1960 which is a Diploma in Company Secretary ship by the Government. As a result, the Institute of Company Secretaries of India stretched in the year 1969. These come under the regulation of the Companies Act in 1956 of Section 25. As per the Act of 1980, this was converted into a constitutional organization.

The Course lineup the knowledge in the field of legal affairs and commercial economic filed with the contemporary practice.
The aim of this Course’s is to expand and control the business.

* Foundation Course – 1st Stage: This is for the individual; he should pass the exam of Higher Secondary to meet up the eligibility criteria.

* Intermediate Course – 2nd Stage: The Intermediate Course which the individual should pass the foundation phase.

* Final Course – Last Stage/Final Course: The Final Course which the individual should clear all the two stages accurately to become a successful Company Secretary.

These are the all the 3 stages to be successfully completed

Eligibility Criteria:

Who and how an individual can pursue

* One should have passed his/her Higher Secondary examination or Intermediate Examination in order to pursue the Company Secretary courses.

* Those who are already a graduate and have cleared post graduation in Cost Accountancy or Chartered Accountancy has an advantage which is they can directly apply for the Intermediate stage of company secretary.

Training after Courses of Company Secretary:

After successfully clearing all the stages of the examinations; candidates have to go for a practical training for 16 months in order that the individual becomes the member of the Institute of the CSI and the person will be allocated a Professional Membership Number.

Extra Qualities:

* The person must be devoted and he/she should accomplish the good writing and speaking English skills

* He/she should also attain a moral character

* He/she should be able to understand the strategies and policies of the company. In a straight way he/she should become diplomatic person and should also be intellectual, elegant, loyal and meticulous as well.

Subjects Covers:

* Basic Economics
* Business Communication
* English
* Financial Accounting
* Company Law
* Management Accounting
* General and Commercial Law
* Corporate Secretarial practice
* Banking and Insurance
* World Trade Organization
* Corporate Restructuring
* Human Resource Management and Industrial Relation
* International Trade
* Joint Ventures and Foreign Collaborations and many more

Variable Universal Life Insurance With World Financial Group

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Variable universal life insurance is a life insurance policy that is available from World Financial Group, and is a very wise investment for your future. Unlike universal health insurance, a variable universal life insurance policy involves investments that are made on your behalf in stocks. Even though many individuals feel that this type of policy is more rigid and risky, brokers that invest the policy funds for World Financial Group, take every care with the assets they are trusted with. Because of the many restrictions and investment that is made into each of the variable universal life insurance policies with World Financial Group, it is a very important and good investment to make for your own future and that of your family.

Some of the things that you need to understand about this type of policy include the premiums, benefits and investments that are made. A premium payment schedule is set up from the beginning and must be adhered to over the entire life of the policy. Benefits of the insurance policy can be two to three times the monetary value that you would realize with a traditional life insurance policy. Because the money paid into the policy is invested, there is a a lot more room for growth of the policy. At the same time, the investments are made can also fail, so just like playing the market there are risks involved. If you are comfortable with these risks though, the investment can be very profitable.

Different Types Of Financial Markets – Get To Know Them

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There are several different types of financial markets. Financial markets are tools that allow people to buy and sell securities or commodities and other financial tools. Investors typically trade and sell the various forms of financial instruments through what is called the stock market. They also have the ability to trade between buyers and sellers. The trading can be done both domestically or internationally according to fair market pricing.

Capital markets are different types of financial markets that deal with the trade of certain types of bonds and stocks. Capital markets can either relate to newly issued bonds and stocks. Or it may handle trades of pre-existing bonds and stocks. This market is typically referred to as either the bond or stock market. The bond market oversees financing regarding the issuance of various types of bonds. And the stock market does the same but for stock issues.

Other vital markets include money markets. Money markets are components of the financial markets. This type of market concerns itself with short-term borrowing and lending practices of securities with a maturation date of one year or less. Various instruments are traded in money markets such as treasury bills, commercial paper, certificates of deposit and several other financial instruments. Money markets essentially facilitate short term debt and capital financing.

There are many other types of financial markets such as; derivatives, foreign exchange, insurance and commodity markets. The purpose of all financial markets is to provide some form of fund raising. It is through these various financial markets that those in need of borrowing funds can find those that are willing to lend funds. These types of financial transaction take place in stock exchange. It is in stock exchange where investors can buy and sell shares of stock from other companies.

The entire foundation of the various types of financial markets is based on a system to borrowing and lending. Those seeking funding can be individuals, corporations, the government and other institutions. There are many reasons these various types of borrowers seek funding. When companies sell shares of their stock, they may be in need of additional capital to meet their expansion needs. Various government entities utilize municipal bonds to raise funds for various projects including improving city infrastructure. There are many reasons for funding across all the different forms of borrowers.

Lenders in the Financial Market are actually the investors. Investors will purchase various forms of financial products which will end up converting into capital for the borrower. There are many different ways these transactions occur. One typical way is when a company issues shares of stock from their company. This is a quick way for companies that are valued in the market place, to make quick cash.

The different types of financial markets are in existence for the purpose of raising capital. As with any institution, there are advantages and disadvantages inherent in the system. It is important to be well informed about the various financial tools before you employ them for your use.