102 articles · Financial Services · page 5 of 6
Articles
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 29 March 2021
Five regulators’ AI questions read like an exam plan
In March 2021, five federal agencies asked banks and credit unions how they use AI. No new rule followed. But the questions mapped onto four tests existing rules already imposed, and those tests still frame how supervisors look at any model.
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 15 March 2021
Why business email compromise belongs to the payments team
The FBI’s 2020 crime report again ranked business email compromise as the costliest kind of online fraud. For banks and credit unions, the controls that decide those losses sit at three points in payment operations, and the inbox is only the first.
Week of 22 February 2021
A few hours without Fedwire, and the bank promises with no fallback
Little lasting harm came of the Federal Reserve’s February 24, 2021 outage. It still revealed how few banks had mapped which customer promises rest on a single central payment rail, rehearsed the narrow manual alternatives, or planned for the backlog afterward.
Week of 25 January 2021
GameStop’s buy button was switched off in the clearinghouse
Retail brokers stopped customers buying GameStop on January 28, 2021, for reasons buried deep in clearing and settlement. The episode showed that a broker’s settlement exposure, its treasury playbook and its app work as one system, even though three different teams own them.
Week of 11 January 2021
Before the 36-hour clock: deciding which bank incidents count
On paper, the banking agencies’ proposed incident notification rule was a simple deadline. The harder work came before the clock started: a named person deciding what counts as a material disruption, and vendor warnings that reach that person in time.
Week of 28 December 2020
Why the ownership registry never replaced the bank’s own file
The Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 promised banks a federal register of who really owns companies. The register was later cut back, the bank’s own duty to know its customers stayed, and a new whistleblower channel changed who could report weak programs.
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 14 September 2020
Filing is not finding: FinCEN’s effectiveness question meets the FinCEN Files
In one September week, FinCEN asked what an effective anti-money laundering program really is, and leaked reports showed banks filing dutifully while flagged money kept moving. The gap between filing, usefulness and action was a data and decision problem that compliance metrics hid.
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 3 August 2020
Capital One’s cloud penalty was a verdict on sequencing
The $80 million penalty against Capital One judged a bank that moved critical systems faster than it could describe, test and watch the risks it was taking on. It passed no verdict on the cloud itself.
Week of 29 June 2020
Why Form CRS was the easy part of Regulation Best Interest
On June 30, 2020, brokers became bound to act in their retail customers’ best interest. Writing the plain-language summary, Form CRS, was the manageable part. Proving each recommendation met the standard, and that conflicts were controlled, took data most firms never captured.
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 25 May 2020
Why valid when made left bank-fintech lenders two open questions
The OCC’s May 29, 2020, rule said a national bank loan’s permissible interest survives its sale. That settled one big question for bank-fintech lending. Two harder ones remained: who is really the lender, and can the bank prove it is in charge?
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.
Week of 6 April 2020
Paycheck Protection: capital was easy, intake was hard
The Paycheck Protection Program opened on April 3, 2020, with a federal guarantee and a Fed facility taking care of the money. What limited lenders was taking in, checking and submitting applications, and how fast they could turn staff into an assembly line.
Week of 23 March 2020
Forbearance on request: what the CARES Act asked of loan servicers
The CARES Act let homeowners with federally backed mortgages pause payments simply by asking, and told lenders how to report those accounts. Servicing built for the occasional exception suddenly had to handle requests, credit reporting and exit plans by the thousand, mostly from home.
Week of 2 March 2020
Why the FFIEC’s pandemic statement was an evidence checklist
On March 6, 2020, bank regulators restated pandemic expectations dating from the avian flu era. The statement’s real value lay in what examiners would later ask to see: staged decisions, critical work done with fewer people, and suppliers coping with the same disruption.
Week of 17 February 2020
Morgan Stanley and E*Trade: wealth scale is a client-data problem
Morgan Stanley’s deal for E*Trade, months after Schwab agreed to buy TD Ameritrade, was a bet on serving clients across do-it-yourself, advised and workplace channels. Whether that scale pays off depends on three layers of integration, and knowing the client comes first.