Regulation

Jun 15, 2015

My favourite banking screw up stories

There are so many examples of banks messing up customer accounts around the world that it would be tough to know where to start … except that as I live in Britain, that’s pretty good place to begin. There media here love to regularly report banks messing up, and so here are some of my…

Jun 4, 2015

Are banks getting a rough deal from regulators (just look at Third Party Account Access)

I seem to be relentlessly blogging about fintech, cryptocurrencies and disruption these days. I guess because these are the things that are being discussed the most at the conferences I attend. So it’s easy to forget that there are key regulatory changes coming into play, and the consequences of these, probably because these things are…

May 29, 2015

The challenges of client onboarding (or why bitcoin will be regulated)

I hosted a dinner last night under Chatham House Rule (no quoting anyone) in a superb venue (Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, established in 1798). The conversation was all about client onboarding and the challenge of keeping it fresh. You get the KYC info, and then the customer is onboard. But for how long? …

Apr 20, 2015

I didn’t say that banks are “too big to be disrupted” but “too regulated to be disrupted”

Quite often, with attribution, I let other websites cut and paste this blog onto their own. American Banker did that recently but changed the title of the blog from The reports of my bank's death are greatly exaggerated to Like Airlines and Pharma, Banking’s Too Big to Disrupt*. In so doing, the intent of the original…

Apr 7, 2015

As the Bitcoin Foundation fails, banks wake up

I’ve blogged before about how bitcoin will become institutionalised, that you cannot have money without government, why it needs a Foundation and how a Wild West structure for value exchange will fail. It’s certainly moving in that direction after the latest revelations about the Bitcoin Foundation, alongside the equally revealing announcements that banks are incorporating…

Feb 16, 2015

Can you have decentralised exchange without centralised control?

I often have these debates with the bitcoin community about whether you can really have money without government. Let’s not call it money without government even, let’s just focus upon the question of whether you can have value exchanges that are unregulated. The main protagonists for bitcoin continually tell me this is the reality. They…

Feb 13, 2015

What does ‘too big to fail’ really mean? [Infographic]

I just received this fantastic infographic from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, discussing developments since 2008 and the financial crisis. The context is whether the Big 5 American Banks are still too big to fail (TBTF), and whether the US government has introduced effective controls under Dodd-Frank to avoid the TBTF situation if another financial…

Jan 14, 2015

Europe’s regulatory jumble is still a puzzle to unfold

In our annual opening meeting at the Financial Services Club David Doyle, Policy Adviser on all matters to do with EU Regulations, gave us a swift canter through the key headlines in European financial markets focus for 2015. These included the guiding principles that: All that is of systemic importance should be regulated and supervised…

Nov 19, 2014

50 shades of grey … hair

I was talking about the component-based model and how it was now moving into component-based regulation, when someone challenged this notion. “Not our regulator”, he said. “Our regulator’s going the other way, and consolidating all regulations under one national system”. I thought: we did that years ago. When we had LIMRA, FIMBRA, IMRO, SFA,…

Nov 12, 2014

When we have component-based banking, what happens to the regulator?

I often talk about component-based banking, most recently in this four-part series in August: Part One: Banking on Demand – the Bank in the Cloud Part Two: Banking on Demand – the Open Sourced Bank Part Three: Banking on Demand – the Customer Focused Bank Part Four: Banking on Demand – the Component-Based Bank but…