The ICO, or initial coin offering, is causing furrowed brows at regulators. It's a fascinating concept and governments are split: should they regulate it on the hoof or, as China has done, ban it until they can work out what do to about it? Or should they pretend it's not happening?
Our sister publication, World Money Laundering Report, has always adopted the view the Deferred Prosecution Agreements are legalised bribery to enable companies and their officers to evade prosecution for crimes committed.
Alun MIlford, General Counsel of the UK's Serious Fraud Office argues, in a speech to the Cambridge Symposium on Economic Crime, 2017, that the DFA is a useful tool, and that the UK version is materially different from the US version on which it is based.
In May 2017, I addressed the global annual conference of the Institute of Enterprise Risk Managers. During that presentation, aimed at the CEOs of major corporations, I explained that board members are responsible for the whole of the Group, not merely a division or even the company of which they are expressly a director of. In this article, I publish those comments, as scripted.
Canada's Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has issued a regulatory notice containing a reminder that there are a number of reserved words, particularly those relating to banking, which may not be used without authority, in relation to financial services. It goes far beyond the use of the words in the name of businesses and will tighten up sloppy language in marketing and so-called social media. It might, also, inadvertently, make the point that "fintech" companies are not banks and do not afford consumers the protection that governments provide to bank depositors.
Yes, yes, we know. Commonwealth Bank's got its problems over a failure to properly design and implement an automatic system and for not acting on the reports it did produce. But that's not the only thing bad that's happening down at the bank that has more short-forms of its name than we can keep up with. CBA, Commonwealth, CB, CommBank... so much for the usual rule of construction that if it's called something different, it is something different.
Australia's superannuation scheme is popularly known as "super" and it has nothing to do with Reggie Perrin although, given the frequent problems with it, it might be the successor to Sunshine Des serts. Now an auditor of self-managed schemes has been banned after it was determined that he had "breached fundamental independence and audit requirements."
National Australia Bank was a victim of a scheme under which a former employer secretly transferred financial planning clients to a company he joined, according to charges filed against him.
This is such a massive topic that we can, today, do little more than make a placeholder article. How, one has to ask, does anyone "miss" tens of thousands of errors? We think it's probably not too difficult and banks, etc. should take note.
Regulations implementing the Liquidity Coverage Ratio in China and the United States are assessed as “compliant” with the Basel framework, while the European Union is “largely compliant”.
Binary options are a simple concept: they pay a fixed return, or nothing. It's a bit like a KickStarter campaign: if you hit the target, you get your money, if you miss it, you don't. But with binary options, the risks are different: fail and you lose your investment. So, there's another way of looking at it: it's a bet and if you lose, you lose your stake, so it's not like an ordinary option where you might still get back some of your original investment. For sophisticated investors and financial adrenalin junkies, they are fine. For everyone else, they are very high risk. Aussie regulator ASIC says that risk is rarely properly explained, and often it is not explained at all.
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