Regulation

During the third phase of the innovation cycle discussed on Friday, the upstart has been noticed by the incumbents and becomes a target to be attacked.  We saw this with Uber from the taxi firms; with Airbnb, it’s the unlicensed sub-letting of properties that hits the news; and with Facebook, …

I attended a great meeting in Austria with Google yesterday.  There were a number of Google Vision presentations and discussions, along with nice vignettes from Accenture and Raiffeisen Bank.  One slide particularly caught my attention however, as I’ve just started to see a cycle in Fintech and this slide from …

We started the new season of the Financial Services Club last night with meetings in both London and Edinburgh.  The Financial Services Club runs from autumn to summer, and this is our 12th year of operation after starting our first meetings in London in 2004.  Now in 8 countries and …

We had an interesting dinner this week talking about customer onboarding.  The focus was on counterparty banks and corporate account opening processes, and the ongoing challenges therein.  In a nutshell, due to the documentary and regulatory requirements for proof of identity and trust, the account opening process is the worst …

So last week I was honoured to present at a conference in Washington just before Senator Elizabeth Warren, the leading voice in America for changing the bank system. Senator Warren made a strong-worded speech condemning big bank mentality.  A few choice comments included a condemnation of Jamie Dimon, who apparently …

I just found some interesting research about how banks in Europe are reacting to the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), and what other banks worldwide think about it. PSD2 is a work-in-progress European regulation that will impact financial institutions already operating within the scope of the first Payment Services Directive …

I mentioned yesterday that a bank CEO asked me the three things I would do if I were him.  My response was: create the dream, live the dream, deliver the dream.  A bit cheesy, but you need to read the context if you want to know more about the background …

I presented at a great conference last week on how ot start a bank.  The conference featured some fine discussions of the challenges and opportunities of opening a new bank in Britain, and included a presentation from Victoria Raffé. Victoria was, until recently, the go to person fornprocessing bank licence …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …