Regulation

Feb 3, 2016

Eurosceptics rule KO!

So we had our annual update on all things EU yesterday from David Doyle, loyal friend of the Financial Services Club and our opening keynote in most years as we are all keen to know what the Eurocrats are thinking. In prepping for the meeting, I got to thinking about the state of Europe today. …

Dec 15, 2015

2015: Time to Open Source Finance

Another key development of 2015 has been the open sourcing of bank services. I’ve talked for a while now about Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) – first blog entry almost seven years ago – and this forecast that anyone in the near future would be able to build their own bank through apps, APIs and analytics. The core of…

Dec 15, 2015

Things worth reading: 15th December 2015

Things we’re reading today include … Banking’s ‘Uber moment’ is already happening — 100,000 bankers lost their jobs in 2015 Transcript: FT City Network on cyber crime Ex-Wall St stars swap banking for fintech The computer virus that blackmails you Why do many Americans mistrust the Federal Reserve? Blockchain believers move into finance Lloyds Bank…

Nov 25, 2015

A fine line for anonymity

I presented to the Financial Services Club meeting in Scotland last night and was asked an intriguing question at the end about anonymity. What are the issues around protection of privacy and, by contrast, the requirements to protect anonymity? If I am buying pornography, drugs or weapons online, am I doing this legally or illegally? …

Nov 17, 2015

Why are Fintech start-ups avoiding the core of banking?

In that same dialogue about when banks should act to block, buy or beat new competition, I realised that the new competition is doing something quite clever. Unsurprisingly, Fintech firms look at banking and realise that it’s pretty dull and onerous stuff. AML, KYC, compliance, audit, regulatory reporting, rules and oversight of business are the…

Nov 12, 2015

The complexity of correspondent banking

I love the idea of money without government but, having sat through a regulatory discussion of correspondent banking, I think this hope is possibly false placed. However, for my banking fraternity, I think they’ll be very interested in two reports recently produced on correspondent banking by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) for…

Nov 9, 2015

How will Banks organise themselves to manage APIs built for PSD2 / XS2A?

The PSD2 is here. For those who don't know what that is, it's the European update to the Payment Services Directive (PSD) of December 2007. The original PSD aimed to harmonise the European payments markets and make the Eurozone behave as a Single Market. It achieved some of those objectives, but the update goes much further…

Oct 26, 2015

From start-up to incumbent: the innovation cycle (Part Two)

During the third phase of the innovation cycle discussed on Friday, the upstart has been noticed by the incumbents and becomes a target to be attacked. We saw this with Uber from the taxi firms; with Airbnb, it’s the unlicensed sub-letting of properties that hits the news; and with Facebook, the target was privacy breaches….

Oct 7, 2015

Another example of why banking is not the same as music

I attended a great meeting in Austria with Google yesterday. There were a number of Google Vision presentations and discussions, along with nice vignettes from Accenture and Raiffeisen Bank. One slide particularly caught my attention however, as I’ve just started to see a cycle in Fintech and this slide from Google’s Creative Evangelist (really?) Jeremy…

Oct 1, 2015

The Challenging State of British Banking

We started the new season of the Financial Services Club last night with meetings in both London and Edinburgh. The Financial Services Club runs from autumn to summer, and this is our 12th year of operation after starting our first meetings in London in 2004. Now in 8 countries and possibly more to come, the…