How not to think about your body
Not If but WhenAD
Category Archives: Voices
World Bank Report: Critiques FATFs Work on National Risk Assessments
The Compliance Lady | Sep 9, 2022
𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗞 𝘃. 𝗙𝗔𝗧𝗙: It is always interesting to come across a study that critiques FATF’s work. In a recent report the World Bank takes a closer look at National Risk Assessments (NRAs). For those not familiar with NRAs, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) requires nations to demonstrate an understanding of the money laundering risks they face in the country by conducting National Risk Assessments.
See: Opinion: Rising cost of compliance may lead to consolidation
- World Bank researchers examined eight of the most advanced nations’ (Canada, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, and the US) NRAs in order to test their knowledge of those fundamental concepts and to draw lessons from them for national governments.
- A deeply flawed methodology is what they found. The eight NRAs show very different conceptualizations, analytic approaches, and products. Each raises serious issues regarding the risk assessment methodology.
- For example, most relied largely on expert opinion, which they solicited in ways that are inconsistent with the well-developed methodology for making use of expert opinion.
- They misinterpreted data from suspicious activity reports and failed to provide risk assessments relevant for policy makers.
- The report concludes with a set of recommendations for policymakers and NRAs regarding improving risk assessments.
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Download the 45 page PDF report --> here
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
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Federal Reserve Speech, Michael Barr: Making the Financial System Safer and Fairer
Federal Reserve | Sep 7, 2022
Vice Chair for Supervision Michael S. Barr at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
Safer and Fairer
- When I say that one of my top goals is to make the financial system safer, it is because keeping it safe involves an active and never-ending effort to analyze risks and make necessary adjustments. There is no responsible alternative to this approach because the stakes are far too high to do otherwise. I am also committed to making it fairer.
- Fairness is fundamental to financial oversight, and I am committed to using the tools of regulation, supervision, and enforcement so that businesses and households have access to the services they need, the information necessary to make their financial decisions, and protection from unfair treatment. Safety and fairness may seem like distinct goals, but they are intertwined. Financial instability unfairly harms those who are economically vulnerable, so making the financial system safer is making it fairer.
Select Highlights
Capital
- An important principle of the capital framework is that it must evolve through a continuous process of incorporating new risks that may emerge.
- A second principle is that the capital framework should be risk focused. Different activities pose different potential for loss, and the capital regime should calibrate requirements to account for the risks of specific activities.
See: Federal Reserve: Crypto and DeFi Insights from Recent Turbulence Through a Financial Stability Lens
- A third principle is that requirements should be tiered. As firms increase in systemic importance, the social cost of their failure grows. Regulations should be designed to require firms to internalize the costs that their potential failure would impose on the broader financial system and thus on businesses and households. This means that firms face higher costs through more stringent regulations as they grow in complexity, size, and interconnectedness. And rightly, that community banks face simpler regulations.
Stablecoins as Private Money
- Stablecoins, like other unregulated private money, could pose financial stability risks.
- History shows that in the absence of appropriate regulation, private money is subject to destabilizing runs, financial instability, and the potential for widespread economic harm.
- In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the advent of prudential bank regulation and deposit insurance and before action was taken to ensure private money creation by banks was appropriately regulated, repeated crises did substantial damage to the U.S. economy.
See: Gary Gensler, Chairman of the SEC Speech
- I believe Congress should work expeditiously to pass much-needed legislation to bring stablecoins, particularly those designed to serve as a means of payment, inside the prudential regulatory perimeter. I look forward to continued partnership with other regulatory agencies and Congress to address the risks of stablecoins.
Innovation, Access, and Consumer Protection
- In the past, I have described the three essential elements of fairness in the financial system as a three-legged stool because all three are necessary for any aspect of fairness to work. The three are (1) financial capability, (2) financial access, and (3) consumer protection.
- In terms of financial capability, an important component is transparency in the cost of services, which means making sure consumers have the information they need to make good decisions.
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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
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A Strategy to Revolutionize Your Body
LinkedIn Reinvtenting Life by Deepak Chopra, MD | Sep 5, 2022
How not to think about your body
- Many situations can be changed one small step at a time, but others require a complete transformation. This arises when a total misconception or practice needs to be overturned.
- Without realizing it, almost everyone makes a similar drastic mistake regarding their bodies. There isn’t enough incentive for people to realize that their bodies need to be totally transformed. Incremental change, after all, is hard enough.
See: Mental Health (for Startups): 5 Strengths to Help You Tackle Anything
- Yet the total misconception we operate from has reached an extreme, which I’d like to explain. The wrong ideas we have about our bodies run from the simplest to the most complex. Here’s a sample (Each of these notions is dead wrong, but as working assumptions, the whole scheme has worked well enough to lead to the remarkable state of modern medicine):
- The body is a physical object like a star, cloud, or mountain.
- It operates like a machine, in this case a machine made of flesh and blood.
- The operations inside this machine obey the law of cause-and-effect, as all mechanical tings must.
- The machine has a super-computer to manage all its intricacies, which is the brain.
- There is no denying that the body is involved in all the following problems that are unsolved by modern medicine: allergies, depression, anxiety, general unhappiness, lack of emotional fulfillment, aging, and death. Since the brain is involved in everything we think, by extension the body is also involved in other unsolved problems stemming from prejudice, violence, toxic emotions, injustice, and all manner of inequality.
Strategy to transform the body
- The solution is to find and use the source of intelligence from which all intelligence (intellectual, artistic, emotional, social, and bodily) emanates. By any measure there is a super-computer that governs the bodymind in thousands of interconnected ways, and besides pure computation, it feels, perceives, interprets, dreams, wishes, and loves.
See: The Silent Mental Health Crisis: Leadership Burnout
- These are non-computational actions, so our super-computer cannot be the brain, whose entire working can be reduced to the chemical equivalent of computations, adding and subtracting charged ions that pass through the membrane of brain cells or jump the gap between two brain cells.
- The transformative step that carries us to a solution is simple: recognize that all intelligence is conscious.
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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
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Rune Christensen: MakerDAO Founder’s ‘Endgame’ Proposal
Decrypt | Liam J. Kelly | Sep 3, 2022
Not If but When
- It described the continued effects of the Tornado Cash sanctions, said the industry has “failed to show any kind of value to society,” and outlined two potential paths forward for Maker.
Plan to Free-float Maker's DAI stablecoin
See: Vitalik: Designing Principles-based Stablecoins that (may not) collapse
“The path of decentralization means limiting our attack surface to physical threats, and specifically our RWA collateral as a percentage of the total portfolio. In the Endgame Plan, I put this limit at 25%,” he writes.
- Christensen also argued for the introduction of a “negative target rate,” essentially Maker’s version of negative interest rates, to drop demand for DAI and increase its supply “as it becomes cheaper to generate [more DAI] with decentralized vaults such as Ethereum.”
See:
ECB Publishes Macroprudential Bulletin on Stablecoins, Climate Risk, and DeFi
CPMI and IOSCO publish final guidance for stablecoins
Continue to the full article --> here
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
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Card Usage is Declining to Digital Wallets: Fee Structure is Unsupportable and Facing Competition
Cashless | Rich Turin | Aug 27, 2022
FIS Global Payment report: here
“Mobile wallets’ share of global POS transactions jumped over 21% YoY in 2021 rising to 28.6% of global POS transaction value, or over US$13.3 trillion.
- Cards are under attack from BNPL, digital wallets, fintechs, and in the near future CBDCs. All will reduce card’s fat margins.
- “Credit card use dropped in 2021 and debit share increased; however, card usage is increasingly shifting to pass-through mobile wallets.
- APAC continues to lead the way in mobile wallet adoption with 44.1% of 2021 POS transaction value; mobile wallets are expected to outpace all other POS payment methods combined in APAC by 2023.”
See: Process Flow Comparison: How VISA Works When Swiping a Credit Card at a Merchant’s Shop VS Digital Wallet
- Globally mobile wallets are expected to rise to 38.6% share (over US$22.7 trillion) by 2025.
- Credit cards are clearly a good business, and while no one disputes their utility, it comes at a cost. How much it’s worth in a new era where digital connectivity is ubiquitous and CBDCs are in use is the question. Source The Economist: here or without paywall here
Digital wallets are “Made in China”
- Excluding China, where mobile wallets account for 54% of all transactions, cash and cards are the leading POS payment method in APAC.
- “Cash represents 16% of regional POS transaction value, yet remains the top payment method in half of the APAC markets in our report, including Indonesia (51%), Thailand (63.4%) and Vietnam (53.8%).
- Despite this, cash is projected to fall to less than 8% of POS transaction value in APAC by 2025.”
See: Will Top of Digital Wallets Threaten Traditional Credit Card Markets?
In South East Asia most nations prefer digital wallets to cards. This makes sense as more than six in ten people in the region are unbanked. Most of these unbanked will never be part of the credit card system and see digital wallets as their entry point to financial inclusion.
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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
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Richard Branson: How Best to Forge Deep Partnerships and Collaborations
LinkedIn Ask Richard | Richard Branson | Aug 2, 2022
As humans, we need connections to thrive – meaningful relationships with family and friends to grow personally, and great professional partnerships to ignite ideas and make a positive impact.
Connect with people who have different strengths and skills
Since the early days at Virgin, I’ve forged partnerships, teams and collaborations with people who bring different skills to the table. When we launched Virgin Records I was dyslexic, 19-years-old, and had no real experience running a business (hence the name Virgin), but I surrounded myself with people who knew what they were doing.
See: Evolving to Work Better Together: Public-Private Partnerships for Digital Payments
We created a tight-knit team who all trusted each other and were motivated by the same purpose of making records cheaper and supporting independent artists. As a team of musicians, creatives, press managers, lawyers, accountants, and beyond – we formed an incredible partnership and disrupted the industry for good.
Stay open to different ideas, opinions, and views on life
Throughout my life I’ve tried to remain open to different opinions, even when they are at complete odds with my own. If you want to grow and create something new – you need to encourage healthy debate and stay open to different ideas. If you want to change someone’s mind and make meaningful change – you need to try and understand where they are coming from. I’ve always said that you should listen more than you talk, and I view every conversation as a learning opportunity.
Break down hierarchies and build relationships based on equality
It’s difficult to form meaningful connections if there are stuffy protocols, stiff upper lips and old-fashioned hierarchies in place. This is why we’ve never had dress codes at Virgin and why I sometimes go around cutting off people’s ties.
See: Sounds like a DAO, Looks like a DAO: Introducing the Modern Digital Organization
It’s also why we embrace reverse mentoring and have created a culture where people can bring their authentic self to work each day and where all ideas are always welcome.
Don’t be afraid to challenge each other
When you form a deep connection, it’s important to become comfortable with challenging one another and saying ‘we can go further than this’. This is how you really stretch out an idea and reach new heights.
Co-create, challenge one another, and never work in silos.
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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
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Crypto Exchanges Comply But Ethereum Community Unhappy About Harsh Canadian Rules
CryptoSlate | Samuel Wan | Aug 18, 2022
The Ontario Securities Commission has implemented CAD$30,000 annual buy limits for some Canadians, drawing criticism from across the community.
The Ontario Securities Commission has implemented CAD$30,000 annual buy limits for some Canadians, drawing criticism from across the community.- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commended community members for speaking out against new Canadian rules limiting crypto buys.
- Newton: “These changes are to protect crypto investors, like yourself, and to make sure investors are aware of the risks associated with investing in crypto assets.”
- As well as the annual buy limits, Newton said its users will now be required to complete a trading questionnaire before being allowed to trade. This is to collect information on users’ trading experience, personal financial situation, and risk tolerance.
- Portfolios will have set loss levels assigned based on the risk tolerance stated in the trading questionnaire. Loss notifications will be sent as the user’s portfolio approaches the loss level indicated.
- Some social media users pointed out that affected individuals can bypass the rules by loading up on unrestricted tokens, transferring to a decentralized exchange, and swapping into the token of their choice.
See: Canadian Securities Regulators Expect Crypto Trading Platforms to Complete Pre-Registration Step
Simon Dixon, CEO/Co-founder, BnkToTheFuture.com:
If you are doing something silly like Canada best to go with % of Net Worth rather than annual sum - New regulatory changes in Canada for crypto. You are allowed to buy as much #BTC / $ETH / $LTC / $BCH as you want, but any other crypto has a limit of 30k net buy per year.
Glad to see Ethereum people pushing against regulations that privilege ETH over other legitimate cryptocurrencies.
(I have not dug into the details of what specifically is going on and to what extent it's a gov thing vs a compliance decision of one business, but either way...) https://t.co/NDYPh5rqsk
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 17, 2022
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Cointelegraph | Brayden Lindrea | Aug 18, 2022
Canada-based crypto exchanges Bitbuy and Newton are enforcing a 30,000 Canadian dollars annual “buy limit” for “restricted coins” for their users based in Ontario in order to “protect consumers” amid tightened regulations.
Under the new changes, Ontario-based crypto traders on Newton and other Canadian crypto platforms will be subject to an annual 30,000 CAD “net buy limit” on all cryptocurrency coins excluding Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC).
See: OpEd: No, Crypto Exchanges Are Not Like Stock Exchanges | New Approaches May Help Solve Old Problems
Newton further clarified that if a trader bought and then sold a restricted coin, the sell amount would be subtracted from the limit. The limit resets every 12 months from the first purchase of restricted coins.
The buy limits come as the crypto platform announced on Wednesday that it has officially registered as a “restricted dealer” in the province of Ontario, which meant that they’re now subject to the regulations set out by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC).
We’re excited to finally announce our registration with the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) and the securities regulatory authorities in all Canadian provinces, Yukon, and Northwest Territories. pic.twitter.com/8zx8UJy2DE
— Newton (@newton_crypto) August 16, 2022
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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
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