Fintech is no longer a niche space in Africa, and over the last few years has become a core market segment not just in South Africa, but across the African continent. Our new episode takes a closer look at fintech in South Africa and the Sub-Saharan African Region.
Digital bonds can reduce the need for intermediaries and therefore lead to lower fixed costs provide better market transparency by increasing capacity to see trade flows and the identity of asset sellers and buyers and provide a much faster settlement speed. While there are still development milestones necessary to make these benefits apparent, the private sector has begun discussions on how to enter this space.
On 13 April 2022, three organizations – the National Internet Finance Association of China, the China Banking Association and the Securities Association of China – jointly issued the Initiative to Prevent relevant Financial Risks of Non-fungible Tokens (“Initiative”). This is the first Non-Fungible Token (NFT) themed official document involving NFT compliance since the rapid development of NFT in China. Although the Initiative is only a self-regulatory statement and not mandatory regulatory rules, considering the special status of the three associations as official industry self-regulatory organizations, to a great extent it still represents the regulatory attitude and trend of supervision.
The Baker McKenzie Cloud Compliance Center provides a snapshot of the legal and regulatory position of cloud in key jurisdictions of interest for financial institutions, and provide simple answers to a few important headline questions that all financial institutions will need to consider when taking the leap to cloud.
On June 7, 2022, Senators Cynthia M. Lummis (R-WY) and Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced a bill to regulate digital assets and promote financial innovation. The proposed legislation is the first significant, bipartisan effort to apply comprehensive regulation to digital assets.
Our series, Finding Balance, maps the environment financial institutions must navigate to thrive in the post-pandemic global market. Starting in 2020 and finishing this year, we looked across our subsectors — at banking and insurance, financial sponsors, as well as financial infrastructure and payment providers — and re-evaluated the potential impact of the major global drivers of change in financial services such as ESG and digital transformation. The series also considers the risks to and pressures on financial institutions presented by increasing corporate indebtedness, the rise of alternative finance, and increasing regulatory scrutiny originating from the 2008 financial crisis.