It’s not just the banks that are struggling with the costs of regulation – so are the regulators. In the US. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has requested a 52% budget hike to $315 million dollars – described by one of its own commissioners as “improbable and unsustainable”.
Bankers can seem a little bit schizophrenic when it comes to regulation – much of the time they complain about the sheer weight of the regulatory burden they face, but at other times they talk of regulation as an opportunity. It could well be that as they have finally realised regulation – and plenty of it – is inevitable, some banks have decided to make a virtue out of it.
Post-trade services company Traiana has opened its Swap Data Repository Service, Harmony TR Connect, for OTC derivatives – providing a tool for market participants to comply with US Dodd-Frank legislation on trade reporting.
As the February 2014 deadline for implementation of Single Euro Payment Area compatible instruments approaches, focus is moving from banks to corporates – and the increasingly clear picture is that few European corporates see any great benefit from adopting the standards involved.
A journalist, a politician and a banker walk into a bar … sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? Feel free to submit a punchline: personally, I’m starting to think that it would be a very sour joke. With banker-bashing now an established national pastime, the press having spectacularly fouled their own nest […]
With EMIR in force, firms are now wrestling with the challenge of classifying their customers – without an industry viewpoint the dialogue could get ugly …
At the beginning of March, George Osborne travelled to the English seaside town of Bournemouth to make a speech at the JP Morgan operations centre there. It wasn’t Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech, but it may well go down as a watershed moment in the history of the UK financial services sector. Osborne is […]
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Proposed policies intended to promote competion in payments could stifle innovation and standardisation in the payments and transaction banking sectors, according to a partner in a leading law firm. Dermot Turing, partner in the international financial institutions and markets group at Clifford Chance, told delegates at the International Payments Summit in London that moves by […]
Credit advisory and investment partnership Venn Partners has launched Venn Risk Analytics, a financial analysis platform that it says will provide an independent and transparent approach to the analysis and valuation of structure finance products.
Following the release of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation, middle and back office professionals in major financial centres now find themselves with a number of difficult questions, that senior management must be able to answer and evidence.
As tough new rules requiring the collateralisation of OTC derivatives take hold in Europe and the US, Citi has retooled its OpenInvestor investment services to include segregated collateral custody accounts – a move the bank says will help mitigate counterparty risk and improve collateral efficiency.
Anti-Money Laundering systems and controls continue to make news in the wake of the high profile failures of 2012. On 5 February, the proposal for the updated EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive was finally released. The proposal imposes a number of new requirements significantly increasing the scope and volume of firms’ KYC processes likely to be required by 2014.
As new rules for OTC derivatives take hold in Europe and in the US, banks and asset managers face a complex cocktail of mandatory clearing, reporting and increased collateral requirements.
Fed Staff Interpretation of Reg. II Creates Precarious Limbo for Debit and Prepaid By Marilyn Bochicchio, CEO, and Brad Fauss, EVP and General Counsel, Brightwell Payments It’s April 3, two days past the effective date for the Durbin Amendment exclusivity routing rules for prepaid. And, many prepaid (and, likely, debit) executives in the United States […]
Benchmark manipulation and fallout from it is not new news, but the global drive to regulate benchmarks is. Europe has made the first move to controlling benchmark manipulation but global co-ordination is needed to create an approach that works for everyone.
Nordic bank Alandsbanken has chosen risk management tools from SunGard, which it says will help the bank to comply with new financial regulations. SunGard’s Ambit Risk and Ambit Performance products will be used by the bank to manage interest rate and liquidity risk and help the bank keep track of its balance sheet.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch has launched a service aimed at helping smaller banks to cope with Dodd-Frank rules for US cross-border trades.
Japan’s Mizuho International has adopted the common reporting, financial reporting and liquidity coverage ratio modules of Wolters Kluwer’s Basel III toolkit, which is designed to help banks cope as regulators tighten the screws on the banking sector’s capital requirements.
US derivatives giant CME Group and OTC trade processing service MarkitServ have connected to support clearing for OTC FX transactions, ahead of new regulations in the US and Europe on the central clearing of OTC contracts.
European payment processor Equens plans to offer a number of services to the Dutch business community to support them in the migration to Single Euro Payments Area formats
The JP Morgan Task Force Report into its Chief Investment Office’s $6 billion-plus loss found the bank’s Value at Risk was being calculated with an Excel spreadsheet that “required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors”.
In future, the possibility of a bank failure will be accepted as a normal market process, and barriers to entry for new start-ups, including a removal of capital requirement obstacles, will be removed, the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England have confirmed.
They were never going to be happy in Switzerland about the US FATCA legislation that will be used to hunt down people avoiding US taxes, but it’s a surprise to hear that some Swiss burghers are feeling sorry for a group of US citizens who have become part of the fabric of society there.
New rules and regulations for financial benchmarks following the Libor scandal will come into effect next Monday, says the Financial Services Authority, and will follow the recommendations of the Wheatley Review.
The shift to SEPA offers significant benefits to businesses – from lower bank fees on euro payments and direct debits to opportunities to streamline processes.
The European Central Bank says that the speed of adopion of direct debits in line with the Single Euro Payments Area standards is “unacceptable” and urged regulators and payment service providers to make greater efforts to push the instrument or risk damaging the reputation of the scheme.
As Europe’s new EMIR derivatives regulation takes hold, senior buy-side representatives have warned that new rules including EMIR and Basel III might actually exacerbate risks rather than reduce them.
The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation recently released five cease and desist orders from January 2013 against six entities for unlicensed activities under the state’s Transmitters of Money Act. These six entities offer a variety of services in Illinois, including domestic and international money transfer, bill payment services and prepaid cards. One of […]
The Federal Reserve Board (Fed) quietly released changes to its FAQs on Reg. II’s restrictions on debit card interchange fees and routing. Five new FAQs were added and one existing FAQ was revised. Changes in two areas directly affect prepaid cards: the exemption for “general use prepaid cards” and the requirement for adding a second […]
Technology and information companies CGI and Experian have partnered to help Europe’s banks and corporates meet the requirements of SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area, on direct debits.
Market data vendor Interactive Data has responded to the introduction of Financial Transaction Taxes in France and Italy with a new service that supports the identification of instruments that are likely to be subject to them.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has announced a new product intended to help clients migrate to mandatory SEPA standards. Called the RBS SEPA Accelerator, the product has a feature that allows a corporate implementing the SEPA XML file format to independently initiate, monitor and amend file testing, validation and end-to-end simulation. This ensures that a corporate can self-test its SEPA readiness.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation will start operating a Japanese over-the-counter derivatives trade repository this month, flowing approval by the Financial Services Agency of Japan.
FATCA compliance might not need a separate programme – it ought to be covered by the same approach as AML, RDR and KYC regulations, among others.
The Basel Committee is planning to start checking on firms’ risk data aggregation plans from early 2013 but awareness surrounding the issues remains low.
As the deadline for mandatory swaps reporting approaches for more and more asset types, US post-trade services utility the DTCC has announced that swaps dealers are now submitting OTC derivatives trade information for all five major asset classes into its US swaps data repository, DDR.
With the January 2014 deadline looming on the horizon, financial organisations are realising that fast action is needed, and needed now, in order to be able to meet the first FATCA deadline for new account on-boarding.
The imposition of a financial transaction tax in Italy on Friday has prompted condemnation from senior financial market observers, who are warning that the new rules could tip Europe into a liquidity drought that will damage banks and asset managers, punish traditional market participants and encourage a slide away from equities towards other asset classes.
More stringent restrictions on outsourcing arrangements affecting all suppliers could lead to increased costs across the board for financial services firms.
