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…
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…
