Financial Services · Economics & Procurement
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17 articles · Financial Services · Economics & Procurement
Articles
Week of 1 June 2026
For a small adviser, Regulation S-P compliance is bought before the breach
The amended Regulation S-P reached smaller advisers and broker-dealers on June 3, 2026, and most had no in-house incident team. For them, compliance means buying in advance: people to respond, the evidence to decide, and the means to notify clients.
Week of 24 November 2025
SitusAMC turned a mid-tier mortgage vendor into a top-tier bank exposure
A breach at SitusAMC, a real estate finance services firm few people had heard of, reached some of the largest U.S. banks. Vendor rankings built on spend and operational importance had missed a company holding sensitive data for many institutions at once.
Week of 18 August 2025
How a fee question pulled open banking off the rulebook and onto the rate card
By asking whether banks may charge for customer data access, the CFPB’s August 2025 notice moved open banking’s rules from regulation into contracts. Big banks could set prices, smaller ones would inherit them through vendors, and fintechs would redesign around them.
Week of 13 January 2025
DORA’s register of information made every bank a data supplier to EU oversight of its vendors
DORA’s register of technology suppliers looked like paperwork. In fact it was a dataset supervisors would pool to spot concentration and pick critical providers, and its quality depended on three data problems most vendor programs had never solved: identity, dependency and depth.
Week of 10 June 2024
Why banking-as-a-service margins never covered the cost of knowing whose money it was
The Fed’s order against Evolve exposed a mismatch built into banking-as-a-service. Sponsor banks earned more as balances grew, but the cost of reconciliation, oversight and partner failure grew with every new program. Banks that priced only the revenue ended up carrying the costs.
Week of 16 October 2023
Free, measured and always on: the open banking interface the CFPB proposed and banks could not price
The CFPB’s October 2023 open banking proposal turned a bank’s data connection into a measured, always-on service it could not charge for. Banks and credit unions had to work out what they must deliver, what they could not recover, and what they still controlled.
Week of 7 August 2023
After Moody’s downgrades, regional bank technology had to argue in unit costs
Moody’s August 2023 downgrades confirmed that the spring’s bank stress would become a long earnings squeeze. Regional bank technology budgets now had to be defended in the CFO’s terms: cost per account, faster liquidity data, and vendor contracts priced for thinner margins.
Week of 6 March 2023
SVB’s depositors learned their bank was an unassessed supplier
Silicon Valley Bank’s failure looked to most people like a banking story. For the companies that kept their cash there, it was something more familiar: a critical supplier collapsing, taking cash, payments and the services built on them down at once.
Week of 16 January 2023
DORA’s two-year runway, measured in contract renewals
Europe’s DORA gave financial firms two years to get their technology houses in order, with no exemption for contracts already signed. The hardest part was rarely writing policies or running tests. It was the calendar for reopening agreements with technology providers.
Week of 7 November 2022
Who checked the people who moved FTX’s money
FTX’s banks, investors and partners had studied its growth. Few had asked three plain questions: who can move the money, who checks them, and whose money it is. Any financial institution can put those questions to every fast-growing counterparty.
Week of 24 October 2022
For credit unions, the 1033 outline was a question for the core processor
The CFPB’s first open banking outline kicked off a review aimed at small institutions. For community banks and credit unions, compliance would arrive as a product from their core and digital banking vendors, so the real decisions were about coverage, cost and contracts.
Week of 29 November 2021
Inflation’s first casualty in bank IT was the change budget
Bank and credit union technology budgets took an inflation squeeze after the Fed dropped “transitory” in late November 2021. Running costs rose on their own through contracts, wages and usage pricing, and modernization money paid the difference.
Week of 20 September 2021
What sanctioning SUEX changed for banks that serve crypto firms
Treasury’s September 2021 sanctions on the crypto exchange SUEX went after the place where ransom money gets cashed out. Because SUEX hid inside other exchanges, banks serving crypto businesses had to decide how deep to look, and what that would cost.
Week of 7 June 2021
Why Basel’s 1,250% risk weight pointed banks toward custody
In June 2021, global bank regulators proposed rules that made owning bitcoin outright ruinously expensive in capital. Read closely, they split the bank crypto question into three different businesses, holding, safeguarding and moving value, and priced out only one of them.
Week of 24 August 2020
Low for long: the rate forecast hidden in bank technology budgets
The Fed signaled in August 2020 that rates would stay near zero for years. Many bank technology plans assumed the same without saying so: in deposit forecasts, in how digital channels were judged and in contract terms that later came due.
Week of 15 June 2020
What due diligence cannot outsource, as Wirecard’s partners found
Wirecard had audited accounts, licenses and blue-chip clients, yet €1.9 billion of its cash probably never existed. Its partners learned that three checks cannot be handed to anyone else: where the money comes from, whether customer funds are visible, and how to leave.
Week of 6 January 2020
Travelex’s outage was every white-label bank’s outage
Ransomware knocked Travelex offline, and the banks selling its travel money under their own names were left with no service and little to tell customers. If a partner carries your brand, it needs your controls: communication, contract terms and a plan for shared dependencies.