The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt the U.S and world economies a series of often unprecedented shocks—the “Great Lockdown” as economists refer to it, basically closed a wide-ranging sectors of the economy including service, travel, tourism and entertainment and many more, resulting in unemployment rates in the U.S. of more than 20 percent as of June 2020 and drastic revisions of worldwide economic growth for 2020 and 2021.

Last week from October 18-20, Georgetown University hosted its “First Annual Fintech Week.”  The announcement of the event and program can be found here.  Georgetown Law, IIEL, NEX, and Thomson Reuters sponsored Fintech Week.  It was a truly first-class gathering with candid and rich conversations involving industry representatives, tech entrepreneurs, regulators, legal specialists, compliance leaders, law enforcement representatives and others. I attended the October 19 panels entitled “Blockchain & Beyond: Distributed Ledgers and the Future of Payments” and “Combatting the Dark Side of Innovation: Cybersecurity and Money Laundering.”  I am glad I did because the panels touched on mutually relevant issues.  Major takeaways from the panels included the need for partnerships and give and take between partners; the need for interoperability for scale, but maybe inter-sectoral interoperability is not needed for now; bloc ...

The Atlantic Council and Thomson Reuters released a timely report on “Big Data: A Twenty-First Century Arms Race” on June 27, 2017, at a well-attended event at the Atlantic Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.  Policymakers all over the world should be aware of the powerful tools at their disposal such as World-Check to address political and economic threats.  This is something of a theme for SIIA.  Recently, for example, we wrote about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help in the anti-money laundering (AML) fight.   We have also written about how FICO’s AML tool works.  The Atlantic Council report contains many realistic policy recommendations, which policymakers from different regulatory “silos” should review.  This is another theme for SIIA.  Regulators and policymakers should engage in regular dialogue with each other.  For example, financial supervisors and privacy regulators should talk to ea ...

The labor economist David Autor opens a recent TED talk with a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the Automatic Teller Machine, bank teller jobs have roughly doubled, from a quarter of a million to half a million. Since 2000, financial institutions have created 100,000 new bank teller jobs.