Financial Institutions

Leveraging Cloud technologies to optimize account opening and onboarding

01/29/18

Financial institutions want the customer service delivery and accessibility benefits the cloud offers but are worried about security, compliance, and scalability.

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House Financial Services Fintech Hearing

01/28/18

This Tuesday I'm going to be testifying about "fintechs" before the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.  My written testimony on this impossibly broad topic is here.

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(More on) Sticky Shipping Contracts

11/02/17

A few days ago, I put up a post about a very interesting recent article by Richard Kilpatrick on highly sticky (and inefficiently so) shipping contracts.

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Why is Netflix Listing its European Bonds on the Isle of Guernsey?

10/28/17

Netflix has long interested me as a company, not only because of shows like "Master of None" (Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang have delivered brilliantly), its darwinian management philosophy (very cool podcast on Planet Money), but because of its uncertain future.

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Visa's Maginot Line: Chip Cards and the Equifax Breach

09/16/17

The media attention on the Equifax breach has been primarily on consumer harm.  There's real consumer harm, but it's generally not direct pecuniary harm.  Instead, the direct pecuniary harm from the breach will be borne by banks and merchants, and it's going to expose the move to Chip (EMV) cards in the United States without an accompanying move to PIN (as in Chip-and-PIN) to be an incredibly costly blunder by US banks.  Basically, Visa, Mastercard, and Amex have built the commercial equivalent of the Maginot Line.

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Equifax: A Call for Public Utility Regulation of Consumer Reporting Agencies

09/12/17

This post diagnoses what went wrong with Equifax and proposes a solution:  a public utility regulation regime for consumer reporting agencies in which the CRAs would be restricted in their ability to pay dividends and executive compensation unless they meet certain performance metrics in terms of reporting accuracy, dispute resolution, and data security.  Here goes: 

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More on Madden

08/28/17

I have a more refined piece on the problems with the Madden fix bills in the American Banker.  See here for my previous thoughts. 

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Guess Who's Supporting Predatory Lending?

08/10/17

Guess who’s sponsoring legislation to facilitate predatory lending? It’s not just the usual suspects from the GOP, but it looks like a number of centrist “New Democrats” are signing up to help predatory financial institutions evade consumer protections. 

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Trump's Bank Regulators: More Swamp Creatures

08/02/17

Following his appointment of Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, the President has nominated Joseph Otting, former CEO of OneWest Bank, to be the chief federal bank regulator as head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

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