These publications and speeches reveal SF Fed insights into how fintech is impacting banking and financial services and causing bank supervisors to think about the risks and opportunities it presents.
Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Categories, Use Cases, and Considerations
Information can provide unique insights to improve welfare, drive business innovation, and help countries navigate crises, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic. Unfortunately, the underlying data that are used to create information and insight, can also be breached, or misused, and require significant resources to manage efficiently and securely. Privacy enhancing technologies are a promising set of tools, techniques, and systems that can help keep data secure and private while still leveraging them to create value.
The Role of Individuals in the Data Ecosystem: Current debates and considerations for individual data protection and data rights in the U.S.
We are living in a time of immense technological change, driven in part by our ability to capture data, convert it into new information, and use that information to inform decision-making, automate activities, and develop new products and services. Unfortunately, information can also be used to manipulate actions, discriminate on improper grounds, and open once intimate spaces up to unforeseen dissection and analysis. A growing range of stakeholders and policymakers are acknowledging the need to more proactively balance the benefits and risks of this data explosion, and there are robust conversations occurring across the country around the potential for improving and expanding U.S. data governance regimes.
The 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act: Understanding Its Implications and Ambiguities
Data privacy is quickly becoming a top-of-mind issue for consumers, businesses, regulators, and legislators following the steady stream of media reports about data breaches and data misuse. The United States has a patchwork of federal and state data privacy laws and statutes across industries, but the increasing focus on these issues has, in part, led to the development of new legal frameworks, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). The CCPA is prompting positive debate about how the patchwork of U.S. laws can be improved, but significant ambiguity remains.
Making Sense of Bitcoin Price Levels
The virtual currency Bitcoin has received considerable attention in the past few years and more recently due to its price surge and subsequent volatility. At the end of 2017–in only a year’s time–the price of a Bitcoin increased about twentyfold to almost $20K. The sudden and unsteady changes in Bitcoin’s price beg the question–how do we consider its price levels? Given that an argument can be made that Bitcoin is a currency, a security, and a commodity, different economic theories might explain the evolution of its price.
Fintech and the U.S. Regulatory Response
Speaking at an international summit in Shanghai, Gerald Tsai, the director of the fintech team at the San Francisco Fed, gives an overview of the U.S. fintech industry and financial regulatory framework. He also discusses the unique operating challenges fintech companies face, as well as the work regulators are doing to address them.
Engaging with Industry: Our Work in Fintech
At a fintech event hosted by Orange Silicon Valley, Tracy Basinger, then a group vice president in the Bank’s Financial Institution Supervision and Credit Group, highlights the fintech work underway inside the Federal Reserve where a team of supervisors is studying fintech developments to understand the range of risks and opportunities and develop recommendations for a broader Federal Reserve response.
Tailoring, Fintech, and Risk Culture: The Talk of the (Community Banking) Town
What is fintech’s role in the financial system? How do banks manage the risks when they partner with fintech firms? In a speech to the Western Independent Bankers, Teresa Curran, then executive vice president and head of supervision of the Bank’s Financial Institution Supervision and Credit Group shares a perspective on this and explores how banks are using technology to improve and expand their services.
Fintech: The Power of the Possible and Potential Pitfalls
In a speech at LendIt USA 2016, John Williams, then the San Francisco Fed’s president and CEO, discusses fintech’s promise and some of its associated risks.
What We’ve Learned…and why it matters – Watch the full interview
In this video, Tracy Basinger, then a group vice president in the Bank’s Financial Institution Supervision and Credit Group explains why fintech is a matter of great importance and interest to the Fed.