What are we going to talk about at SIBOS? Part One

We have a Financial Services Club meeting this Thursday with a panel previewing what we will be talking about at SIBOS.  Therefore, I thought I would provide some background by noting that, for the past few years, we’ve talked a lot at SIBOS about regulations, and this year is no different.

With Dodd-Frank, the Liikanen Report, European Banking Union, the Banking Reform Act and, of course, Basel III reshaping the industry after the crisis, along with specific change structures targeting pieces of the banking system such as the Volcker Rule, MiFID II and PSD2, there has been plenty to talk about.

These things do not go away so I thought that I would give you a quick preview of the regulatory highlights in this year’s agenda for SIBOS September 29 through October 2 in Boston:

TARGET2-Securities: what’s next? chaired by Alberto Giovannini on Monday morning with a return to this subject on Wednesday morning, when Jean-Michel Godeffroy and Marc Bayle of the European Central Bank outline the terms of how to deal with integration with TARGET2, are worth noting for the post-trade crowd.

Demystifying Regulators and Regulations, where a group of academics laying bare the regulatory landscape as part of the newly launched SIBOS University is a worthy session.

Adam Szubin, Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and US Department of the Treasury discusses sanctions and monitoring of foreign assets on Tuesday morning, followed by a related discussion of tackling the Know Your Customer Challenge on Wednesday morning.

A Wednesday lunch session talking about how standards can help with the implementation of regulation sounds like fun?

Dealing with Financial Crime Compliance (or avoiding sanctions fines) on Wednesday afternoon followed up by another session on same subject focused upon using Big Data analytics to track financial crime should be well attended by banks like BNP Paribas.

The increasing impact of regulation on corporates is another interesting closing session on Wednesday afternoon, combined with SWIFTRef in action  is a plug for the new SWIFTRef Reference Data Service that promises to help firms get accurate reference data (BICs, LEIs, IBANs, national bank identifiers, SSIs, etc) and counterparty financial information

And, in a final finale fanfare, SIBOS regulatory focus finishes with The opportunities and challenges of SEPA - what's next? on Thursday afternoon.  Wowser!

As can be seen, we continue our discussions about regulatory change in depth, although the shift of dialogue has moved significantly towards financial crime, KYC (Know Your Client) and cybercrime, in light of the heavy-hitting American fines of major European banks over sanctions violations.

No doubt all of this has got you highly pumped up now for our annual tradeshow jamboree about standards and regulations.  Talking of which, I left out the half a dozen discussions of ISO20022 and the many other standards debates.  I also left out all of the amazing sessions on innovation, technology change and financial inclusion.

In fact, apart from the regulatory stuff, there’s an awful lot more to talk about at SIBOS, as I will discuss in my next post.