Before 2010, I was writing a lot about technology but it was all heavily geared towards regulations. It was pretty dull, to be honest, but worthy. MiFID and PSD were top of mind, along with Basel III and other global, European and domestic regulations. I wrote a lot about regulations. Then it pivoted at the…
I keep trying to define and delineate more and more of this FinTech Wave. It is no longer FinTech, but PayTech, IDTech, InsurTech, WealthTech, RegTech, GulfTech and more. The thing that strikes me the most is that there are two fundamentally different FinTech camps: those attacking existing business structures and those creating new structures. For…
Last week marked ten years since the financial crisis hit. On August 9 2007, BNP Paribas froze three of its American funds, the first in a chain of events which would lead to the biggest recession since the Great Depression. These funds were tied to American subprime mortgages and the freeze was the first public…
It was interesting to see the release of a discussion paper by the EBA (European Banking Authority) last Friday. As a regulatory body, they have decided that they need to take action on FinTech, and are asking for input on what action to take. The EBA is taking forward work in relation to FinTech and…
I recently hosted Nick Ogden, the founder of WorldPay and serial entrepreneur, at our Nordic Finance Innovation meetings in Stockholm and Oslo. Nick is now launching the first new UK clearing bank for over 250 years called ClearBank. I’d heard a few rumblings about ClearBank, but hadn’t really go the message until I saw him…
I recently had exposure to two industry reports that are worth bringing to your attention. The first is the Innovate Finance research into Industry Sandboxes. Commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK regulator, the aim was to identify how Industry Sandboxes, rather than Regulatory Sandboxes, can help to create new services in finance….
I got a very interesting heads-up yesterday to a campaign the European FinTech start-ups have kicked off to try and stop the big, nasty banks screwing them with their version of PSD2. I’ve previously blogged that the banks will implement non-standard APIs to make it difficult to access their services without writing code to work with…
I see that Donald Trump is thinking about bringing back Glass-Steagall style laws to the US banks. This would force the banks to separate and break up their operations between their investment bank and the retail and commercial bank structures. It intrigues me that this is being considered 18 years after the law was repealed, but why…
I’m regularly blogging and talking about the legacy economy known as America. This will irritate my American colleagues, but come on, which country still issues more checks (cheques) than the rest of the world combined? Which country took a decade longer to get Chip & PIN than most? Which country is still struggling to work…
I blogged recently about American banks beating up the regulators to stop account access via APIs. I heard this in various White House meetings in 2016, and assumed all banks and bank people felt the same way. Well, they don’t. Citi’s head of FinTech Policy, Andres Wolberg-Stok, got in touch to clarify the true situation….
