Hats off to RBS, which sent its clients a link to this year’s FX poll bang on 5pm last Friday. However, I have to report that while the bank is clearly keen, one of its rivals managed to get clients voting before the poll went live. This raised the ire of Euromoney’s poll head honcho, Andrew Newby.
Now Andrew might appear to be an affable fellow, but he possesses a core made of steel – he showed it this week when he sacked a work-experience girl. The early polling forced him to send an e-mail out to effectively the whole of the FX market.
“Dear all,
“The Poll goes live at 5pm, from which time you can start this year’s street brawl. Our own emails will start going out at 6pm onwards. I hope that the people who already have voted, giving real email addresses for very large European real money funds aren’t important.
“That’s because I'm going to delete every single molecule of information in the database as of 16.59 and 59 seconds. The site even warns that everything submitted before 5pm will be deleted. You might want to check that your sales/marketing people haven’t started yet. If they have, punch them very, very hard in the face,” he wrote.
Poor old John Stewart at State Street was swift to reply. Unfortunately though, he appears to have hit the Reply All button, so the whole of the market got to see his request. “Andrew – please please please could you try and maintain that info and we can ask our clients to submit again if you like as I think we did not realize that the site was not active yet,” he pleaded. Funny thing is, those who had voted weren’t apparently State Street’s clients. I hear that John’s peers in the market didn’t make fun of him at all.