The party would create new legislation to "open banking so Canadians can connect with fintech companies that can provide a better offer for banking services."
The Conservative Party of Canada today released its full 160-page election platform — an ambitious agenda that promises billions of dollars in new spending to prop up an economy ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike past Conservative platforms, this one embraces a robust role for government in the economy through large cash injections to help businesses weather the pandemic crisis over the next two years.
The multi-billion dollar plan has not yet been costed; the party says the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has not finished studying the numbers.
O'Toole said a Conservative government would balance the budget in ten years' time. The federal deficit for this fiscal year alone is expected to be $381.6 billion.
"You'll probably notice ideas that you haven't heard from Conservatives like me before. It's time for Conservatives to take inequality seriously, because that's becoming more of a problem in our country," Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole says in the opening paragraphs of the document.
Beyond job-creation measures and child care, the detailed platform includes a number of populist-minded measures — a tougher regulatory stance on cell phone companies, a crackdown on grocery price fixing and new legislation to "open banking so Canadians can connect with fintech companies that can provide a better offer for banking services."
A Conservative-led government would also order the Competition Bureau to investigate bank fees. O'Toole said he would allow foreign telecommunications companies to offer cell phone service to Canadians to drive down prices, "provided that the same treatment is reciprocated for Canadian companies in that company's country."
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
The second largest U.S. bank said that the rise of CBDCs was "inevitable."
Bank of America (BofA) called central bank digital currencies “a much more effective payment system than cash,” in a research paper published Wednesday.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank, the second largest in the U.S. by total assets, said that CBDCs could “replace cash completely in the (distant) future.”
Inevitable....replace cash completely in the (distant) future.
The report comes amid surging interest among central banks. A May report by the blockchain infrastructure platform Bison Trails found that about 80% of central banks are exploring use cases involving CBDCs, with 40% already testing proof-of-concept programs.
Bank of America said that CBDC adoption was “inevitable,” citing a declining role for cash, the private sector’s increasing use of blockchain technology, loss of control over currency and CBDCs’ potential to boost the economy. It also noted that central banks that did not launch their own digital currencies could see decreasing demand for their currencies, “substantially in some cases,” and a smaller “global role.”
Addressing concerns that a CBDC could compete with bank deposits, spur bank runs and compromise individual security, the paper highlighted central banks’ “very cautious approach.”
The paper said that CBDCs qualified as money “by allowing store of value and being a unit of account and means of exchange,” differentiating them from cryptocurrencies that “do not meet these criteria. “Since they are traded, they could be seen as an asset class,” the paper said.
Bank of America said that CBDCs could lessen the need for stablecoins, noting that the latter could “present a material financial stability risk during times of market stress when there may be a crypto to fiat currency run.”
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
Open-source software quietly affects nearly every issue in AI policy, but it is largely absent from discussions around AI policy—policymakers need to more actively consider OSS’s role in AI.
Open-source software (OSS), software that is free to access, use, and change without restrictions, plays a central role in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI). Across open-source programming languages such as Python, R, C++, Java, Scala, Javascript, Julia, and others, there are thousands of implementations of machine learning algorithms. OSS frameworks for machine learning, including tidymodels in R and Scikit-learn in Python, have helped consolidate many diverse algorithms into a consistent machine learning process and enabled far easier use for the everyday data scientist. There are also OSS tools specific to the especially important subfield of deep learning, which is dominated by Google’s Tensorflow and Facebook’s PyTorch. Manipulation and analysis of big data (data sets too large for a single computer) were also revolutionized by OSS, first by the Hadoop ecosystem and later by projects like Spark. These are not simply some of the AI tools—they are the best AI tools. While proprietary data analysis software may sometimes enable machine learning without the need to write code, it does not enable analytics that are as well developed as those in modern OSS.
That the most advanced tools for machine learning are largely free and publicly available matters for policymakers, and thus the OSS world deserves more attention. The United States government has gotten better at supporting OSS broadly, notably through the Federal Source Code Policy, which encourages agencies to release more of the code they write and procure. Yet the relationship between OSS and AI policy goes less acknowledged. Trump administration documents on AI regulation and using AI at federal agencies mention OSS only in passing. The Obama administration’s AI strategy notes the important role of OSS in AI innovation, but does not mention its relevance to other issues. A new European Parliament report states that European OSS policies lack “a clear link to the AI policies and strategies… for most countries.” In fact, the recent proposed European AI regulation does not address the role of OSS at all.
Generally speaking, analyses and international comparisons of AI capacity often include talent, funding, data, semiconductors, and compute access, but often lack a discussion of the role of OSS. This is an unfortunate oversight since OSS quietly affects nearly every issue in AI policy. AI tools built in OSS enable the faster adoption of AI in science and industry, while also speeding proliferation of ethical AI practices. At the same time, OSS is playing a complex role in markets—powering innovation in many areas, while also further empowering Google and Facebook and challenging the traditional role of standards bodies.
1. OSS speeds AI adoption
OSS enables and increases AI adoption by reducing the level of mathematical and technical knowledge necessary to use AI. Implementing the complex math of algorithms into code is difficult and time-consuming, which means that if an open-source alternative already exists, it can be a huge benefit for any individual data scientist. Open-source developers often work on projects to build skills and get community feedback, but there is also prestige inherent in building popular OSS. Often, several different versions of the same algorithm are developed in OSS, with the best code winning out (perhaps due to its speed, versatility, or documentation). In addition to this competitive element, OSS can also be highly collaborative. Since OSS code is all public, it can be cross-examined and interrogated for bugs or possible improvements. With collaborative development and an engaged community, as often arises around popular OSS, this collaborative-competitive environment can frequently result in accessible, robust, and high-quality code.
Generally, data scientists are focused on interpreting the results of their data analyses and trying to appropriately fit their algorithms into a digital service or product. This means that well-written open-source AI code significantly expands the capacity of the average data scientist, letting them use more current machine learning algorithms and functionality. Much attention has been paid to training and retaining AI talent, but making AI easier to use, which open-source code does, may have a similarly significant impact in enabling economic growth. Of course, this is undeniably a double-edged sword, as easier to use OSS AI also enables innovation in pernicious applications of AI, including cyberattacks and deepfakes.
2. OSS helps reduce AI bias
Similarly, open-source AI tools can enable the broader and better use of ethical AI. Open-source tools like OSS like IBM’s AI Fairness 360, Microsoft’s Fairlearn, and the University of Chicago’s Aequitas ease technical barriers to detecting and mitigating AI bias. There are also open-source tools for interpretable and explainable AI, such as IBM’s AI Explainability 360 or Chris Molnar’s interpretable machine learning tool and book, which make it easier for data scientists to interrogate the inner workings of their models. This is critical since data scientists and machine learning engineers at private companies are often time-constrained and operating in competitive markets. In order to keep their jobs, they must work hard on developing models and building products, without necessarily the same pressure on thoroughly examining models for biases. Academic researchers and journalists have done a remarkable job generating broad public awareness of the potential harms of AI bias, and so many data scientists understand these concerns and are personally invested in building ethical AI systems. For those engaged, but busy, data scientists, open-source code can be incredibly helpful in discovering and mitigating discriminatory aspects of machine learning.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
As expected, the advisory committee has recommended that Canada focus on implementing read access at launch and write access in a later phase of open banking. Read access lets consumers and businesses share their financial information with fintechs, while write access lets them authorize fintechs to act upon it — by opening a new bank account, for example, or moving money from one account to another. The advisory committee’s timeline suggests that we shouldn’t even begin considering write access until 2023.
This is a mistake of import. As the Competition Bureau has said, Canada will see more competition and innovation in the financial sector if we make the movement of money between financial institutions more seamless, empowering Canadians to better vote with their dollars. Write access, if done right, will make the movement of money more seamless than ever.
I’m not saying write access should be turned on at the same time read access is. The advisory committee is a sage assembly. They know that they risk getting nothing if they ask for too much. That’s why they even suggested starting with a limited scope of read access to financial information. Write access — because we’re talking about the movement of money — comes with more risk and complexity, which, according to the advisory committee, would delay the roll out of open banking.
So if now’s not a good time to consider write access, then when is?
The devil is in the (implementation) details
The first is that this is just a report and it’s still up to the federal government to act on the recommendations. Though there’s no reason to think the federal government won’t, there’s no reason to think it will. Minister Freeland’s statement in support of a “regulated, made-in-Canada system” is reassuring, but such a system can take many shapes and sizes, and promises are just promises for a sector that has seen so many go unfulfilled.
The second is that the advisory committee’s recommended timeline is looking increasingly uncertain.
For one, open banking is already behind schedule. The report was dated April, but the report was released in August. With a proposed go-live of January 2023, we should have already delivered one of the report’s foundational recommendations by now: appoint a “tsar” to work with the relevant players to make progress on the first phase of open banking.
If I had to bet, I’d say the timeline is going to look more and more uncertain as time goes on. With an impending election, we’re going to lose another few months of valuable time. On top of that, the report mentions a few things that could further delay the implementation of a “regulated, made-in-Canada system,” including “existing legislative or regulatory impediments.” As we all know, there’s no upper bound on how long legislative and regulatory change can take.
Tough practical and political choices will need to be made. The cynic in me suspects that these trade-offs will be made behind closed doors, as push comes to shove in the negotiations between banks and the government. Whether they’ll be made to open banking’s favour or detriment is to be determined.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
Quantum Computing Can Serve as a Multifaceted Tool to Help Scientists and Engineers Take on the Challenge of Ensuring a Sustainable Future, Say Industry Figures.
A new documentary – Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future from The Quantum Daily, developed in partnership with Oxford Instruments Nanoscience – was released today with a call from industry experts to leverage the power of quantum computing in addressing the world’s urgent sustainability challenges.
The documentary features insights from leading quantum computing experts and tech giants such as Google, IBM and Intel, as well as start-ups such as SeeQC and PsiQuantum regarding how quantum technologies could help address key sustainability issues, including:
reduce the energy use of datacenters and servers that underpin today’s digital world
reduce the energy required for complex computations even as demand continues to rise in AI, optimization, simulation and more
accelerate the development of new applications to address global sustainability such as carbon capture and battery development
minimize quantum computing’s own potential environmental impact
Quantum computers use quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computations that can vastly outperform classical computers at certain tasks. The tasks quantum computers can do may lead to solutions for humankind’s most pressing challenges. Nonetheless, there continues to be significant obstacles to overcome before these machines are powerful enough to meet their expected potential.
“We have one planet, and these conversations must happen now”
“We have one planet, and these conversations must happen now,” said Stuart Woods, Managing Director of Oxford Instruments NanoScience, a leading provider of high technology material science tools and systems for research and industry. “The broad participation of industry thought leaders in this film shows the support and the importance of prioritizing sustainability in quantum technologies.”
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
Regulatory change is overwhelming organizations. Many industries, like financial services, are past the point of treading water as they actively drown in regulatory change from the turbulent waves of laws, regulations, enforcement actions, administrative decisions, and more around the world. Regulatory compliance and reporting is a moving target as organizations are bombarded with thousands of new regulations, changes to existing regulations, enforcement actions, and more each year. Regulatory change impacts the organization as it reacts to:
Frequency of change. In the past five years, the number of regulatory changes has more than doubled while the typical organization has not increased staff or updated processes to manage regulatory change. In financial services, according to the latest Thomson Reuters research, there was an average of 257 regulatory change events every business day in 2020, which is just in this one industry. In the past five years, the number of regulatory change updates impacting organizations has grown extensively across industries.
Global context. Regulatory change is not limited to one jurisdiction but is a turbulent sea of change around the world. Regulations have a global impact on organizations and markets. In Asia, GRC 20/20 finds that there is often more concern over EU and US regulation than over-regulation from Asian countries. Inconsistency across regulations from jurisdiction to jurisdiction brings complexity to regulatory compliance.
Inconsistency in regulations. Managing compliance and keeping up with regulatory changes, exams, and reporting requirements becomes complicated when faced with international requirements. Regulatory jurisdictions have varying approaches such as principle-based regulation (also called outcome-based regulation) that is popular across Europe and other countries around the world, while the United States and other countries approach a prescriptive approach to regulation that is more akin to a check box list of requirements in specifically telling the firm what has to be done. The principle-based approach gives the organization flexibility with the focus on the achievement of an outcome and not the specific process that got them there. There are conflicting challenges in privacy regulations and other laws impacting organizations across jurisdictions.
Expansion into new markets. It has become complex for organizations to remain in foreign markets as well as enter into new markets. The pressure to expand operations and services is significant as the organization seeks to grow revenue and be competitive, while at the same time being constrained by the turbulent sea of changing regulations and requirements.
Focus on risk assessment. Regulatory compliance is increasingly pushed to integrate with broader enterprise and operational risk strategies with a focus on delivering a specific assessment of compliance risks. For example, regulators in the US seek to ensure that compliance officers do compliance risk assessments. This is also a theme picked up on by law enforcement agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The courts, with the United States Sentencing Commission, also evaluate the culpability of an organization on compliance based on compliance risk. The discipline of risk management is becoming a prerequisite for compliance officer skills to ensure that compliance has a seat at the enterprise risk management (ERM) / GRC table.
Hoards of regulatory information. Organizations are overwhelmed by information from legal, regulatory updates, newsletters, websites, emails, journals, blogs, tweets, and content aggregators. Compliance and legal roles struggle to monitor a growing array of regulations, legislation, regulator findings/rulings, and enforcement actions. The volume and redundancy of information add to the problem. Managing regulatory change requires weeding through an array of redundant change notifications and getting the right information to the right person to determine the business impact of regulatory change and appropriate response. Organizations must search for the marrow of regulatory details and transform it into actionable intelligence, which can be acted upon in a measurable and consistent manner.
Defensible compliance. Regulators across industries are requiring that compliance is not just well documented, but is operationally effective. This can be seen in the latest DoJ Evaluation of Compliance Program guidance. Case in point, Morgan Stanley is praised by regulators as a model compliance program and is the first company in 35 years of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Acts (FCPA) history to not be prosecuted despite bribery and corruption in their Asian real estate business. One of the points the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) referenced was Morgan Stanley’s ability to keep compliance current in the midst of regulatory change: “Morgan Stanley’s internal policies . . .were updated regularly to reflect regulatory developments and specific risks.”
The amount of regulatory change coming at organizations is staggering. Consider an international bank headquartered in South America that embarked on a project to build a database of regulatory requirements impacting the bank globally. The detail went down to the required level so an individual regulation may have a few requirements to more than a thousand, depending on the regulation. After eighteen months of cataloging over 81,000 requirements, they abandoned the project. The reason was that the content was already obsolete—so much had changed during the process of documenting that they did not have the resources to maintain the volume of regulatory change.
A Tier 1 Canadian bank has expressed a similar regulatory requirement documentation project demise for the same reason. If you print the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority rulebook, it comes to a stack of paper six feet tall. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is over 174,000 pages. When printed and laid out end-to-end that is a paper trail that is 25 miles long, nearly as long as a marathon.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
The London Hard Fork represents a big step toward an overarching upgrade of the network known as Ethereum 2.0
The Ethereum network is one of the most established and probably the most used blockchains today. Its toolkit of functions has enabled it to become the home for multiple stablecoins, countless NFTs (non-fungible tokens), dapps (decentralized applications) and DeFi projects (decentralized finance projects). Moreover, its native digital asset, ETH (Ether), holds the position of second-largest cryptocurrency value by market cap. However, Ethereum’s explosive growth over the past six years has resulted in an energy intensive, expensive and inefficient blockchain that must now overcome some of these pain points. Enter, the London Hard Fork.
On Aug. 4 at block 12,965,000, the London Hard Fork will go live on the Ethereum main network when a series of five protocol updates called EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) are deployed.
The series of EIP upgrades require miners and nodes to update their software in order to keep interacting with Ethereum’s blockchain.
Since the upgrade is not backward-compatible, it is known as a ‘hard fork’ — if a node doesn’t upgrade its blockchain, it can no longer be a part of the network.
Collectively, the EIPs are designed to improve the network but the reason talk of the London Hard Fork is bubbling over from Ethereum circles into mainstream media is because it represents a big step toward an overarching upgrade of the network known as Ethereum 2.0, which will see Ethereum’s current PoW (proof-of-work) protocol replaced with a PoS (proof-of-stake) protocol.
The difference between PoW and PoS is relatively straightforward. PoW is based on mining verification and income is derived mainly from the power of the machines involved. This is the same kind of protocol used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain. In contrast, PoS is based on users “staking” a cryptocurrency by depositing it in order to become a validator and thereafter deriving income by getting rewarded for being a good validator.
Of the five EIPs that comprise the London Hard Fork, EIP-1559 is getting the most attention because it is the core improvement in Ethereum’s attempt to generate greater bandwidth in its path migrating away from PoW toward PoS. It is anticipated that PoS will help Ethereum unlock its full potential and make it more scalable, secure and sustainable.
EIP-1559 replaces the existing auction-based “gas fee” model of Ethereum and creates a new fee structure that splits transaction fees into “base fees” and “incentive tips” It also creates a new base-fee “burn mechanism.” In a nutshell, this means that there is a big change in the way that miners will be compensated for their work and some of them are not happy about it.
Presently, Ethereum’s transaction fees are based on a simple auction mechanism in which users submit transactions offering a certain amount of “gas” — think of it like a transaction fee — and miners choose the transactions with the highest offers. This is a simple enough system to understand but it leads to a number of inefficiencies, which the EIP-1559 aims to address by creating a different fee structure.
From the moment of the EIP-1559 update, miners will receive payment only for including a transaction in a block (via the “incentive tip”). The remainder of the commission or “base fee”, which is proportional to the size of the transaction, will be sent to the network and destroyed, or “burned” through a new base-fee burn mechanism.This means that the miner who used to receive 100 per cent of the transaction fees will now only pocket the optional “incentive tip” that incentivizes the miner for faster inclusion of a transaction in the blockchain.
Since the base fees are being destroyed, the effect is that some ETH is forever removed from the circulating supply and this is what has investors bullish on it. Some claim that this will create a deflationary (or at least a less inflationary) effect on ETH and that it will enhance ETH’s chances to become a preferred store-of-value asset due to its lower supply.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. 
The report neglects write access
Regulatory change is overwhelming organizations. Many industries, like financial services, are past the point of treading water as they actively drown in regulatory change from the turbulent waves of laws, regulations, enforcement actions, administrative decisions, and more around the world. Regulatory compliance and reporting is a moving target as organizations are bombarded with thousands of new regulations, changes to existing regulations, enforcement actions, and more each year. Regulatory change impacts the organization as it reacts to:
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. 
The London Hard Fork represents a big step toward an overarching upgrade of the network known as Ethereum 2.0
