Modo CEO, Bruce Parker, spoke with PYMNTS about the recent US Department of Treasury report on supporting FinTech growth and innovation in the States.
Getting bogged down in a maze or taking unnecessary risks — the current climate for FinTech in the United States often leaves players with only those two stark choices, according to Bruce Parker, founder and CEO of Modo, which describes itself as a “cloud-based utility” that enables payment system interoperability.
In the wake of this week’s release of a U.S. Department of the Treasury report on how to encourage more FinTech, payments executives were mulling over the report, wondering if it would lead to any concrete improvements and giving their ideas to PYMNTS about how to best improve payments innovation and entrepreneurship.
FinTech Improvements
The report, released in support of President Trump’s call to regulate the U.S. financial system around a set of core principles, offered guidance and recommendations that have long bounced around the FinTech space, and which no doubt already command the support of many executives. In general, the department proposed to fuel more FinTech activity in the United States by loosening federal regulations, enacting national data breach protections and drafting “model laws” at the state level to reduce overlapping red tape.
Additionally, the report calls upon the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to allow FinTech companies to operate in all states, according to the same standards as banks — a move that would require the office to issue special charters to those younger payment and financial technology firms.
The report’s treatment of artificial intelligence (AI) offers a typical prescription for such a FinTech future. Federal summits and interagency efforts centered around AI would help promote the technology, which is increasingly finding use in payments and commerce. In addition, the avoidance of “unnecessary burden[s] or obstacles” on companies developing AI and machine learning technology, especially in regards to testing, would serve to speed up AI advancements.
Re-examining Tradeoffs
FinTech executives are eager for such moves.
“It’s about time to re-examine the trade-offs between innovation, competition and regulation in FinTech,” Parker said. Calling the state-by-state FinTech regulatory model “absurd,” he said that, for FinTech firms, “the journey to a regulatory, compliant business model goes through a maddening number of twists and turns of conflicting legal opinions — confusing agency interactions — and colossal red tape.”
Those are, of course, familiar and long-standing complaints, but the world in which FinTech must compete and thrive is changing. Europe’s PSD2 is providing opportunities for financial technology upstarts to more efficiently access data that is vital to their visions and operations. Also, regulators around the world are warming up to the idea of FinTech “sandboxes” — a concept the Treasury Department treated warmly in its report, and which allows for the relatively quick testing of new FinTech products under loosened regulations.
A FinTech charter might go a long way toward putting U.S. firms on a better level with their peers and competitors in Europe and Asia, Parker said.
Read the full article on PYMNTS.