Regulation

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…

I’ve been at a few conferences this week, and was amused by an audience poll at one event. The moderator first of all asked: Do you believe that the regulators are in the incumbent’s pockets and protect the industry from new competition? You may find it gratifying that most of the audience disagreed with the…

In mid-December 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a really interesting 32-page paper on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The timing wasn’t great as most of the City was out getting smashed at Christmas parties, so I thought it best to put it aside until the New Year hangovers were out of the way…

I’ve recently noted a number of reports about Open Banking, with many published recently due to its imminent arrival on January 13, 2018. Source: IBM As can be seen, we have several different groups working on Open Banking. There’s the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) with Open APIs for payments, Open Banking regulations which are…

I was thinking about this question of how to regulate global technology platforms that don’t recognise national boundaries, mainly in the context of crypto and digital currencies. How can you regulate a global currency that has no view of state or national laws? Obviously, you can only regulate it when someone puts national currency in…

As part of the blockchain conference, I chaired a session with some central bankers talking about their views on distributed ledger technologies. These central banks have run trials and are thinking about it, but none of them are particularly big on blockchain right now. As mentioned on Friday, they see it as a long-term development…