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 It intrigues me that this is being considered 18 years after the law was repealed, but why…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….
On Wednesday the American Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)* followed up on its promise last December to introduce a national bank charter for Fintech bank startups by issuing a white paper on how to apply for a licence, the evaluation process and what will be involved. It’s a massive move towards allowing…
I was having a conversation with a friend about the issues at Monzo this week (among others). Their third-party payments processor had an outage at the weekend so the cards couldn’t be used. Then they had crashes on Android and lost payments in the app. It’s a challenge being a challenger. However, the reason for…
I recently blogged about the lack of obvious return on investment for immediate (also called faster, instant or real-time) payments, and mentioned that I would be launching research about this. Well that research survey is now live. It will only take you ten minutes, so please join in by clicking this link. Just to put…
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 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…
