FCA publishes 2016/17 Business Plan

05 April 2016

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has today published its annual Business Plan. The Business Plan outlines seven priority themes which will guide how the FCA will use its flexible resources and provide additional focus for the core activities of the organisation.  The seven themes are: pensions, financial crime and anti-money laundering, wholesale financial markets, advice, innovation and technology, firms’ culture and governance, and the treatment of existing customers.
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Processing data in the EU: A business perspective on recent legal developments

03 April 2016

Edwin Jacobs

For the past six months there have been quite a few ground-breaking developments in the EU’s legal domain of personal data processing. We are referring first and foremost to the General Data Protection Regulation, a new European legal instrument that will be the main tool in the legal arsenal for the protection of personal data. Secondly, in the aftermath of the Schrems-judgement in October last year, the European Union and the United States intensified their work towards a suitable replacement for the Safe Harbour regime, a legal arrangement for transferring personal data from the EU to the US. In February this year these efforts culminated in an “EU-US Privacy Shield”. These developments will have a significant impact on how businesses are allowed to process personal data.
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Elephant in the boardroom: Corruption

01 April 2016
Knowledge Base

by Evert-Jan Lammers

Some organizations address integrity issues in the in-house magazine, in balanced scorecards, in board meetings, in their communication to stakeholders. Other organizations don’t. Good versus bad company or proactive versus reactive company. Let’s zoom-in on the pro-active companies, the mature organizations. Their board meetings are not only about the what-and-when, but also about the why-and-how. Participants in these meetings dare to speak-up, empowered and protected by shared values. These meeting rooms are light and clear.

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The resurgence of banking malware

28 March 2016

Andy Scherpenberg

We know it is coming. And yet, we aren’t ready. Of course we saw a decline in the use of banking malware. Why would a criminal spend time, effort and money to develop a software that defrauds a banking customer if you can just ask their credentials over the phone? Indeed: low cost, highly efficient social engineering took the fraud world by storm when it proved utterly easy to scare people into revealing their login, password and authentication codes.  Continue reading…

Reducing variation in credit risk-weighted assets

24 March 2016

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision today released a consultative document entitled Reducing variation in credit risk-weighted assets – constraints on the use of internal model approaches. The consultative document sets out a proposed set of changes to the Basel framework’s advanced internal ratings-based approach and the foundation internal ratings-based approach. The IRB approaches permit banks to use internal models as inputs for determining their regulatory capital requirements for credit risk, subject to certain constraints. The proposed changes to the IRB approaches are a key element of the regulatory reform programme that the Basel Committee has committed to finalise by end-2016.

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Rent to own provider Buy as You View to pay £939,000 to around 59,000 customers

22 March 2016

Dunraven Finance Ltd, trading under the name Buy as You View (BAYV), has entered into an agreement with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to redress £939,000 to more than 59,000 customers for historic unfair treatment. BAYV is a rent-to-own provider selling household goods, such as electronics and furniture on hire purchase to customers.
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