Regulation

Someone asked me to elaborate on the links between banks, government, the economy and society, and this was well illustrated by the video I shared the other day of James Pierpont Morgan, who founded the JPMorgan empire (see end of this blog entry). That all began with learning the banking ropes in Europe; then enabling…

I guess I’ll build on yesterday’s blog, about the python of regulation, by harking back to a comment I heard many years ago in Brussels. Talking with one of the key regulators, I asked why they had the regulation in place with so much interpretation. My point was that Italy was implementing the regulation in…

I wrote this the other day for Channel News Asia: FinTech firms may look like banks soon The gist of my thread is that, due to Ant Group offloading all of their risk to banks, the authorities are now stepping in to say that any innovator, even one as big as Ant, needs to be…

Over a decade ago, I curated a book about Europe’s Singe Euro Payments Area (SEPA). I was quite boring ten years ago, before FinTech made me cool. However, I still watch SEPA, the PSD regs, MiFID and more. I’m still a bit boring underneath it all. I don’t blog about it, because the audience for…

I keep wondering about the future. Governments vs Libertarians? Centralised vs decentralised? DeFi vs CBDC? My conclusion is CBDCs will win, in the financial markets. Why? Because money is critical to our lives. It’s a key. You cannot ignore it. It’s what we created to make society orderly. I discussed this a lot and in…

I got this endorsement from the one and only Alice Cooper the other day …  … it was sent by a friend to cheer me up and it surely did. A lot. Love Alice Cooper. But it made me reflect too on the message: “change the system”. Change the system. Change The System. Change…

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) came out with another white paper last week (read the previous one on the rise of central bank digital currencies here). This one focused upon: Regulating fintech financing: digital banks and fintech platforms Interesting stuff. Here’s the executive summary: This paper explores how fintech financing is regulated. New technology-enabled…

I’m going to shut up about challenger banks soon, but noted that even the regulator is getting worried about them. After Monzo’s admittance that it may not continue as a going concern if the pandemic continues through 2021, N26 admitting that profit is not their focus, Revolut’s tripling of losses, and more issues out there,…

During my MoneyBox interview about Wirecard (see end of this blog), Paul asked me the question: how could this happen again? What’s next? And I said, we learn from our mistakes. Progress never stops. Wirecard won’t shut down FinTech. It will amend it. This means this is not the end of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), but an…