I came across a short and stimulating article by the IMF staff on current state of digital and paper money which identifies essential, conceptual features of all payment types and based on that categorizes them into 5 types. From the paper, I took away three main insights -first there is a compelling argument that traditional forms of payment transactions by banks (referred to as B-Money) will face intense competition from electronic money (or E-Money) in coming years; this will obviously hurt the profitability of the banks given that all retail banks are rely primarily on deposits for funding and will create further disruption in the banking sector. Second, the article conjectures that eventually banks could be forced to offer electronic money or similar products and we can see that happening already with JP Morgan dipping toes into digital money waters by offering JPM Coin by end of 2019. Lastly, role of the central banks will be pivotal as they could jump into the fray and offer central bank digital currency (being explored by Sweden, Uruguay, China, Thailand, Japan and South Korea) and also shape the environment and the pace of innovation for digital money.
AI in Finance – a report by the Alan Turing Institute report
A recent report by the Alan Turing Institute notes that use of AI in Finance in financial services will impact 4 principal areas – fraud detection; use of chatbots; algorithmic trading and increase in regulatory and policy making. The report makes for a good read and while the first three use cases are credible there is skepticism about the impact AI/ML will have on algorithmic trading. In this post I have included a short summary of the report with an assessment and critique of the 4 areas with supporting links to relevant articles.
TRIM interim results – April 2019
Background Targeted Review of Internal Models (TRIM) is a regulation under ECB (European Central Bank) which is designed to bring common understanding and consistency across
What is the OCC concerned about?
OCC Spring 2019 Semiannual Risk Report Background: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) publishes a report (Semiannual Risk Perspective) twice a year
BigTech, FinTech and the Banks
Summary: New working papers by Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Financial Stability Board (FSB) conclude that financial institutions are more vulnerable to BigTech companies
Cybersecurity – not a technology problem
In my last post (Risk Management version 2020?) on evolving nature of Risk Management, I noted that non-financial risks dominate financial risks for financial institutions