Regulation

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…

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…

So Theresa May made clear on Tuesday what the Brexit plan is … or did she?  Some say that her plan is Vague (in reference to her appearance on the cover of Vogue) whilst others gave it a big thumbs up. Mind you, he did write most of it.  The clear points that came out…

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…