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 …
Read More »Banks charged dead people fees for a decade
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 …
Read More »The lies spread by bankers about cryptocurrencies
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 …
Read More »Mark Carney slams bitcoin
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 …
Read More »Regulating the cryptocurrency markets
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 …
Read More »#GAFA, #BAT and #BBVA
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 …
Read More »Even with a bribe, no one switches their bank account
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 …
Read More »More on #Brexit, passporting and equivalence
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 …
Read More »#Brexit, Banking and Equivalence
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 …
Read More »Innovation with compliance is difficult
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 …
Read More »What does the FCA think about blockchain?
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 …
Read More »The best research into Open Banking
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, …
Read More »Regulating the unregulated
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 …
Read More »The regulator’s view of bitcoin, 2017
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 …
Read More »Who owns the customers’ data?
Following on from the discussions about identity on Monday, it gets interesting to think about the customers’ data and who owns it, especially in light of the Payment Services Directive 2, PSD2 for short, which comes into force at the start of next year. The regulation forces banks to open …
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