As we navigate the fallout of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, focus on the rapidly changing threats to information security, radically improve compliance infrastructures to support regulatory imperatives and work out new and sustainable business models, it almost seems unfair to throw another area of concern at banks. Unfortunately, for those who would like Read More
Outsourcing is no stranger to big bank IT chiefs, who long ago shifted from the view that they needed to build important technology systems in-house. The recent financial crisis, however, appears to have accelerated the trend as financial institutions face ever-greater pressure to keep up with technological advances. “The market pressures to be more nimble and to Read More
Your company may not be fully complying with the wage and hour regulations of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and you may not even know it. In recent years, the DOL has increased its enforcement of these regulations, which has left financial services companies subject to heightened financial and reputational risk. A particular challenge is properly Read More
The advent of mobile and online banking, so-called “alternative” payment applications and the rapid increase of nonbanks in the retail payments environment have clearly revolutionized the payments system but those changes have raised a key question: Does the rapid disaggregation of the payments value chain have to spell gloom and doom from a fraud-and-security perspective? Or, to Read More
Concepts that start out simply rarely end that way, which you can see in the evolution of terminology. Take the relatively common practice of contracting with another party to provide goods or services. What began as “contract services” has morphed over time into: outsourcing, supply chain management, logistics, third-part service providers, supplier risk management, vendor performance management Read More
Fraud is endemic to the global payments system and the tools financial institutions have historically used to fight it are marginal at best. Instead, a hybrid approach using multiple analytic methods including link or network analysis to identify suspicious behavior at the transaction, account, customer and network levels provides the greatest return for an institution’s investment. This Read More
As banks continue to make large expenditures on technology for anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, they would be well-advised to continue employing traditional due diligence and following long-standing and basic Know Your Customer procedures. In the long run, a strong balance of high-tech savvy and common sense diligence can deter and detect criminals who are continually developing new Read More
With Dodd-Frank rulemaking slowing to a crawl (most recently a delay in finalizing the Volcker Rule) and ongoing debate in the European Union about where to go next with regulations in the wake of continued financial unrest, the only thing certain about future regulations is that there will be more and they will be increasingly stringent. Financial Read More
So far, so good. Fifteen of the 19 largest financial institutions passed the latest round of Federal Reserve stress tests, opening the door for increased dividends and stock buybacks. It is indeed reassuring that these banks have built fortress-like balance sheets that can withstand potentially severe stress, including the dark-but-possible scenario of 13% unemployment, negative Gross Domestic Read More
As we move into the height of the 2012 presidential election cycle, issues of consumer protection in the financial services industry are front and center on the political agenda, as can be seen in the recent controversy involving the president’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Central to the Read More
Editor's Note: For an update to the article, read the 2018 article: Today's best practices for compliance risk assessment.Putting together a compliance risk assessment is pretty much standard procedure by now. Although risk assessment methodology in general has been around for quite a while, its prominence in the compliance field is a fairly recent phenomenon. Formulating the Read More
With Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation more than 2,300 pages long, it will take some time to understand its full impact on financial institutions. In the interim, there are steps companies can take to deepen their risk management culture and ensure they’re building a strong foundation to effectively execute in the “new normal.” Improving and strengthening risk management Read More
The threat will come. Bank of America Corp.’s Donna Turner, senior vice president, global fraud policy executive, repeated this phrase three times, like a mantra, during her presentation on mobile fraud at last month’s BAI Payments Connect conference. And all the other panelists agreed: mobile fraud is not yet a serious problem for the financial services industry Read More
