The dust has had time to settle on the much-awaited publication of the Kalifa Report on the fintech industry. The report, by Ron Kalifa, was conducted on behalf of The City of London Corporation, at the behest of Her Majesty’s Treasury, and could not have come at a more opportune time.
Compliance teams are no longer the same as they used to be – they are now considered the third most-stressful City job, after investment bankers and traders. The combination of the financial crisis, Brexit and cybercrime has resulted in a high-stress profession, with constant roadblocks in the way of success.
There were many victims of 2008’s Great Recession, but perhaps none were as hard-pressed as those in emerging markets, who were effectively cut off by the suddenly risk-averse big banks of developed countries. Access to finance through traditional avenues is still hit and miss for those in developing countries, but things are looking up with the advent of technological solutions that are bridging the gap to a more promising future.
The word compliance may hit a sour note for some bankers, but in the end, compliance demonstrates commitment to transparency, integrity and best practices. If only compliance wasn’t so complicated and costly. Effective data archiving is necessary to make data repositories what they must be. Most banks archive data, but many need to upgrade their processes. What are the five elements that financial firms should include in their data-archiving overhauls?
The decade following the financial crisis unleashed a torrent of regulatory requirements. Financial institutions have spent billions on technology and operations to achieve regulatory compliance; the frequency of new requirements is high. Despite all of this, regulators have not been satisfied with the quality of the data and level of transparency. How can banks and regulators strike a balance between the costs and the benefits of regulation?
Being your company’s chief compliance officer is not a job for the faint of heart. Being the intermediary between regulators and your fellow staff is guaranteed to make you unpopular at times—and the position can render you vulnerable to reputational risk. What are the core attributes needed to transcend the risks to become the most effective CCO possible, protecting your company against the potentially devastating consequences of non-compliance?
The last financial crisis demanded a response, and that response was regulation…and more regulation, to such an extent that financial institutions are scurrying to hire additional compliance staff to try to make sense of it all. Fortunately technology has come to the rescue once again by spawning regtech, which is evolving to better manage the formidable challenges created by regulatory change.
Without regulations, digitalisation is not feasible. New rules and laws are a headache for banks and increase the administrative burden while reducing client satisfaction. But they also create transparency and openness, which can lead to new and improved financial services. The challenge is how to provide new services in a customer-centric way. Regtech may be the solution.
Getting regulatory compliance right is a necessity for financial institutions today, because getting it wrong is a punishingly expensive mistake. Just as fintech has been rapidly embraced by the industry due to its many proven benefits, the new kid on the technology block, regtech, is set to blaze its own innovation trail, disrupting the old ways of doing things in a bid to cut costs.
App developers are shooting ahead like missiles, struggling to outdo each other in the creativity department, and customers are loving them for it. But are banks keeping up, or have they been left out of the digital party, still struggling with outdated systems that simply “don’t do” technology all that well? 2017, characterized by the unexpected, is separating the serious contenders from the rest.