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…
I outlined yesterday the fact that 98% of money laundering goes unchecked, allowing $1.6 trillion a year to be used for terrorist funding, drug dealers, sex traffickers and possibly worse. This was prompted by a conversation about AML (Anti-Money Laundering) with the CEO and Co-Founder of I met Coinfirm, Pawel Kuskowski. So what’s the solution, is how…
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 (Compliance Officer), UBS (Director of Compliance, Compliance and Operational Risk Officer) and RBS (Head…
We had a fun session of the Financial Services Club this week, in light of the lack of clarity on Brexit from the UK Gov. The discussion was our regular New Year kick-off meeting with special guest David Doyle, sage of all EU regulations affecting Financial Services. David provided us with great insight into the…
For those who weren’t looking, you might have missed the release of the Framework for FinTechh white paper released by the White House last Friday. It’s the output of the work performed by the National Economic Council’s Adrienne Harris and her team, who I’ve been delighted to support. The paper represents the policy objectives for…
In case you missed it, there was an important keynote speech by Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at a conference in France last Friday. It has some key announcements in there, so I’m reproducing the speech here for those interested in immediate payments and what Europe is doing. Keynote speech…
I’m just starting a project on real-time, immediate, faster payments or whatever you call it. It’s basically making a payment that is either settled within seconds or the data is moved and settlement takes place at a later time, but it look immediate. There’s lots of reports out there about immediate payments, with my favourite…
I write so much that I sometimes forget what I’ve written, where. For example, Mark Sievert of Silicon Valley Bank made an interesting comment on my predictions for 2017: Happy New Year Chris! One topic I am not hearing much about is the OCC December decision to offer Federal Charters to Fintech firms. http://bit.ly/OCCFintech. Many…
We had a meeting of the Financial Services Club in Oslo last night, talking about the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) and Open APIs (Application Program Interfaces). It was a fun meeting and covered the in’s and out’s of closed versus open APIs, the implications of allowing Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) access to the bank’s…
