Financial Services · Data & AI
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11 articles · Financial Services · Data & AI
Articles
Week of 13 July 2026
Fedwire’s ISO 20022 switch gave banks rich payment data their core systems still truncate
A year after Fedwire switched to ISO 20022, the richer payment message reached most US banks intact. The value inside it often did not, lost at the customer’s keyboard, inside banks’ own systems, or in screening and fraud tools never set up to read it.
Week of 17 November 2025
For EU consumer lenders, the credit-scoring deadline that mattered was never the AI Act’s
Brussels proposed delaying the AI Act’s high-risk rules, and credit scoring seemed to get breathing room. For consumer lenders it was a mirage: the GDPR, as Europe’s top court read it, and the Consumer Credit Directive’s November 2026 date still set the pace.
Week of 11 March 2024
Why the AI Act left bank credit models with the supervisor they already had
Europe’s new AI law did not hand bank credit models to a new regulator. It routed them through the banking supervisor banks already knew, and let existing governance count for some duties. The real work was finding what model risk management never covered.
Week of 20 February 2023
Banks blocked ChatGPT over leaks; recordkeeping set the longer limit
Big banks restricted ChatGPT in 2023 over the headline worry of confidential data slipping out. Contracts fixed that within a year. The slower, harder limits came from duties to keep and supervise records and to explain decisions.
Week of 28 February 2022
Russia’s sanctions tested banks’ ownership data more than their name lists
From late February 2022, sanctions on Russia arrived in fast waves, from several governments, against sprawling corporate groups. Checking names against lists caught the obvious cases. The real exposure hid in unnamed subsidiaries, changing dates and differing national rules: all data problems.
Week of 7 February 2022
Bitfinex’s six-year trace ran through records that banks keep
Investigators followed bitcoin stolen in 2016 all the way to a $3.6 billion seizure in 2022, because the ledger never forgets. The decisive links sat at regulated firms, so banks need records of crypto-linked activity that still make sense years later.
Week of 11 October 2021
FinCEN’s ransomware analysis turned well-written SARs into threat intelligence
In October 2021, FinCEN used banks’ suspicious activity reports to sketch the money trail behind ransomware. It worked only where filers had recorded details like wallet addresses clearly. That same choice decides how useful the data is inside the bank.
Week of 21 June 2021
TransUnion won Ramirez, and name-only matching still lost
In June 2021 the Supreme Court narrowed who can sue over inaccurate credit file flags. Underneath was a matching failure that banks and fintechs share, and the ruling changed none of the three things that govern it.
Week of 22 March 2021
Each Archegos lender already held enough data to act
Archegos is usually told as a story of bets hidden across many banks. The costlier failure sat inside individual banks, in three layers: what each could see of its own exposure, what it could infer about the rest, and whether anyone acted.
Week of 5 October 2020
Citi’s orders put data lineage on the safety and soundness agenda
The October 2020 actions against Citigroup treated weak data governance as a safety and soundness failure, alongside risk management and controls. Every bank inherited the expectation that it can show where its important numbers come from, and who answers for them.
Week of 18 May 2020
Small-dollar loans, alternative data and the governance attached
In May 2020, four federal regulators invited banks and credit unions back into small loans and welcomed new data and technology for deciding who qualifies. Using bank-account data well took consented data access, careful model oversight and fair lending controls for automated decisions.