consumer protection
When A Bank Cannot Refuse To Open An Account and How EU Directive 2014/92/EU Can Help?
When I worked at Amazon, people complained to me about lost or delayed parcels. When I worked at PayPal, people complained to me about blocked payments. Now, people complain to me about their banks. In this specific post I would like to address a question whether or not a Read more…
News and Trends
What is Your Biggest Compliance Challenge Today?
What is you biggest compliance challenge today? – I will tell you about mine The biggest challenge I have, when taking on a new FinTech project, is to estimate how long things may take. How long it takes in compliance often means when the product will go live. So, it’s Read more…
Career
Amazon vs PayPal
I wrote this comparison between Amazon and PayPal in 2014, but funnily enough, it might still be almost accurate (but treat this with a huge degree of irony, please 
) Meeting style Too many aggressively opinionated people To many politely indecisive people Attitude to PowerPoint Read more…
News and Trends
Key FinTech Trends of 2017-2018 That Will Continue Well Into 2020
AI first” principle. In the recent past, the key principle of all Fintech products was “Mobile First”. All products were designed to be user-friendly on mobile devices. By contrast, all new products and even backend solutions now are designed to be able to benefit from Artificial Intelligence inputs. If it’s not Read more…
Conferences
Key Compliance and Related Takeaways from VivaTech 2017 in Paris
Courtesy of Pavel Afanasiev Compliance thrives when regulatory frameworks solidify. The overwhelming majority of speakers on subjects with links to compliance (mostly in fintech, mobile payments and banking roundtables) have nodded to the idea that even if there are substantial differences in regulation of financial institutions and payment services across Read more…
Crypto
My Crypto Account Application Got Rejected – Why?
People ask me these questions over and over again, and it’s visibly (or digitally) clear how furious and annoyed they are. Their main complaint is that crypto is supposed to be the most democratizing and omni-accessible service, this is why it was created in the first place, which is why Read more…
Conferences
P2P Financial Systems Conference London
This was a conference very much focused on content quality and, perhaps, less on self-marketing: A relatively tight group of academic researchers, regulators, lawyers, technologists, government officials and entrepreneurs came together for a couple of days to discuss various aspects of P2P financials and of blockchain. Frankly, from the learning Read more…