Grid

For ten years, my friends cover at Z/Yen have been producing the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), on behalf of the City of London.  It’s a research program where people can answer the survey questionnaire and, from those participating, the different cities of the world vying to be financial hubs are ranked.  Around 2,500 people respond…

Banks are scared.  They’ve seen the rise of the new world of open APIs, apps and analytics and know that their organisations are not yet ready or fit to change to that world.  What to do? Well, the easiest thing to do is to block access to the bank’s data.  If third party FinTech firms…

The big headline on Friday was Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order to review the Dodd-Frank regulations.  He also changed rules relating to brokers, so that they can seek maximised profits rather than being forced to behave in the client’s best interests, as ordered under the Obama Administration. MSN reports: Taken together, the president’s…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … The Semantic Regulator (#RegTech Rules) A bank has to make a regulatory change every 12 minutes.  That’s some task.  A bigger question must also be: how can a regulatory check that a bank is compliant with their regulatory changes, if their regulations change every 12…

Curating the daily news yesterday, I was surprised to see an article published by Wharton Business School that irritated me. Wharton Business School is one of America’s Ivy League Universities up there with Yale and Harvard.  It should be publishing informed insights but this post was more of a headline grabber from Scott A. Snyder, chief…

I realised the other day that I didn’t have a good slide comparing the old bank world with the new.  I often refer to it with the line that banks were built in the last century for the physical distribution of money as paper in branches with buildings and humans; now they have to be…

So I’m in a conference that’s talking all the time about B2B2C models.  I guess that’s because there are a lot of FinTech startups focused on the B2B2C structures like Leveris, Thought Machine, Solaris, RailsBank, ClearBank, CBW and more.  But these are not B2B2C structures.  The people talked B2B2C have got that wrong.  There is…

A bank has to make a regulatory change every 12 minutes.  That’s some task.  A bigger question must also be: how can a regulatory check that a bank is compliant with their regulatory changes, if their regulations change every 12 minutes are run to 1,000’s of pages? The answer is they can’t, but they don’t…

I recently spent a day in a meeting discussing Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) … yawn.  Well, it is a bit of a dull area, but highly important.  In fact, what gets me is that regulations are the big ticket barrier to change in banking.  It’s what protects the banks from disruption and change, as…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … Laundering-as-a-Service (a bank USP) I was surprised the other day when I met Pawel Kuskowski, CEO and Co-founder of Coinfirm, a start-up firm offering Compliance-as-a-Service.  Pawel has been trained in compliance and AML, having worked with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions including AIG…