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“Prepare to present document showing what your business is,” Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, managing principal with MRV Associates, suggests. “Have financial statements ready, especially ones that show revenues and expenses. Having a cash flow statement with sources and uses of funds for the business is also useful.”

“Another interest rate cut in the US, coupled with very low and in some cases negative rates in Europe will adversely impact US banks,” said Mayra Rodriguez Valladares at MRV Associates. “They will soon face a wave of mortgage borrowers who will want to refinance to lower-rate mortgages,” she added. “Also, any new mortgages and other types of loans will be at lower rates, compressing banks’ net interest margins.”

“Most banks are absolute horror shows when it comes to having systems that are outdated, and even people who are still working with spreadsheets,” according to Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, managing principal at capital markets consultancy MRV Associates. “But when you ask them where they want to be, everyone says Goldman. They are the premier institution when you think of good [technological] systems; they were willing to plow tons of money into building their systems in-house, and not outsourcing as much.

“I read somewhere that two-thirds of the people working on Wall Street are under 40,” she said. “It’s not that they forgot the financial crisis of 2008. They never experienced it in the first place.”

“For investors who are very conservative, Treasurys or AAA government bonds and investment-grade municipal bonds are preferred,” says Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, managing principal at MRV Associates and a bank regulatory and capital markets consultant based in New York City. “Yet I think any investor should have a diversity of assets including corporate bonds, securitizations and equities.”

“The big banks could already do risky trading by pretending to be market making — these changes will give them more leeway to do so,” said Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, managing principal at New York-based MRV Associates, which trains bank examiners and finance executives. Harsher capital and liquidity requirements introduced after the crisis have been even more restraining on the trading risks the big banks can take. They will continue to exert pressure even under a softer Volcker Rule, Rodriquez Valladares said. “If they start taking more risk, capital rules should kick in and force them to have more capital backing that risk, so that’s the backup control mechanism,” she said. “We’ll see if that will work as it should.”