Skip to main content

A holistic approach to future-proofing the financial system

Nobuchika Mori, Commissioner of Japan’s Financial Service Agency, writing in the Financial Times in May 2017, called for a fundamental change in the way that regulators relate to financial services marketplaces. He says that…

Regulators have made the global financial system more resilient by major regulatory reforms… But all this should not be the end of the story. It is now time to shift the focus from regulation to supervision.

From A holistic approach to future-proofing the financial system

I would rephrase this slightly, in the language of big data and blockchain, always-on digital identities and roboadvisors, to call for an era of shared ledgers, translucent transactions and ambient accountability, in which the traditional boundaries around accounting and auditing dissolve to form a new way to manage markets to the benefit of society.

This new era is what I have labelled the era of “the glass bank”. I’ve written before about the origins of this concept and the way in which it came to crystallise my thinking around the response to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Central to my thinking is the

In his magnificent “Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff”, Professor Edward Balleisen (associate professor of history at Duke University) talks about the way in which the notion of transparency in accounting formed a fundamental response to the frauds of the modern age and an enabler for the steady shift from the centuries-old age of caveat emptor to the modern age of caveat venditor. 

Ambient accountability is the logical next step.

 

 

 

from 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...
Post a Comment
Read more

Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force

Forum friend Ian Grigg, who I always take very seriously indeed on any such topic, wrote about Corda on his blog and concluded with a powerful statement. Bitcoin told the users it wanted an unstoppable currency - sure, works for a small group but not for the mass market. Ethereum told their users they need an unstoppable machine - which worked how spectacularly with the DAO? Not. What. We. Wanted. Corda is the only game in town because it's the only one that asked the users. It's that simple. From Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force xxx It seems to me, however, what Ian is pointing to as the greatest strength of their approach is also the greatest weakness. A staple feature of unimaginative management consultants presentations about innovation is some variation on the statement by Henry Ford that if you had asked users what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses coupled with some variation on the statement by Steve jobs that it was pointless ask...
Post a Comment
Read more

Barclays slated after CIO takes a year to open a bank account

xxx The rigorous KYC procedures at US banks the New Jersey-based crime ring created more than 7,000 fake identities to get tens of thousands of credit cards From  Woman Gets 3 Years for Role in $200M Credit Card Fraud Scam - ABC News xxx xxxx Barclays slated after CIO takes a year to open a bank account : "An adviser to a new charitable incorporated organisation that spent more than a year trying to open a bank account has blasted Barclays for its onerous demands and disproportionate due diligence." xxx In a recent survey for VocaLink, some two-thirds of respondents said that they saw value in the establishment of a central KYC utility. They are wrong. We don’t need a central KYC utility, we need a federated reputation infrastructure. Or, to put it another way, a financial services passport ( as I mentioned earlier in the year ).
Post a Comment
Read more