Regulation

Building on yesterday’s discussions of regulating, I got copied on a letter that’s doing the rounds from Sam Woods, Deputy Governor of the PRA (the Prudential Regulatory Authority). It lays out the official position and expectations of the regulator when financial insitutions are dealing with crypto-assets. It makes for interesting reading and you can read…

I just listened to a presentation by Nick Thompson, editor-in-chief at Wired, about all things in the future of tech. A lot of it was focused upon Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning towards the end, but the first half was interesting as it focused upon why there is a backlash against Silicon Valley right now. He put…

Everywhere around the world, I find politicians and bankers in dodgy practices. It’s because power and money go together. We’ve seen this clearly in EU and USA with LIBOR, CDOs, PPI, bribes, parties, prostitutes and more, and I was reminded of it when seeing a presentation the other day by Platon. Platon is a world-renowned…

I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said it was “complete rubbish” to suggest the main use of cryptocurrencies was criminal….

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has slammed the rise of cryptocurrencies insisting the costs to mine bitcoin is ‘enormous‘ and that the energy consumption is worrying, declaring current costs of electricity consumption used to mine the coins are “double the electricity consumption of Scotland.” The UK’s leading banker claims that cryptocurrencies will…

Someone made the comment on my platform piece about what happens when there are no Jack Ma’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s, as the whole thing is decentralised? I guess that this is logical as my last line was that government control of cryptocurrencies is “not so easy for cryptocurrencies that have no head office or central…

I spotted two stories about BBVA that appeared yesterday. The first was in the Financial Times with BBVA Chairman Francisco Gonzalez asking the G20 to take action against the big internet firms, saying “authorities [need] to bring order to this massive change” that could “pose risks to financial stability”. He warns that groups such as…

I was intrigued to see the latest account switching numbers for the UK. Switching has been a focus of the Competition & Markets Authority, regulators, government and more, and yet promoting people to switch is not working. According to the latest stats, there are around 70 million deposit accounts across the UK, with the average citizen…

Another great Brexit debate at the ISITC Europe annual bash the other day. I was on a panel with Kay Swinburne, MEP Member of Economic and Monetary Affairs; Rebecca Healy, Lead Analyst of Financial Market Structure at Liquidnet; and Michael Cooper, CTO Radianz, BT Global Banking and Financial Markets at BT; and we had a…

As usual, the Financial Services Club was delighted to host David Doyle as our starting speaker for 2018, and he presented a fine overview of all the things bubbling as top  of the agenda in the European Union’s regulatory plans for 2018. Led by the Bulgarian presidency, the agenda focuses primarily on pushing forward the…