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Regtech, Compliance and Technology Judgement Rule
Get PDFThis Article focuses on the rise of Financial Technology, which revolutionized consumer financial service products, and challenged policymakers with regulating the rapidly evolving financial industry. In particular, it explores Regulatory Technology, also known as RegTech, which is the finance industry’s use of technology, especially information technology, in the context of regulatory monitoring, reporting and compliance. RegTech is designed to solve industry needs for a more effective and efficient way to automate corporate governance and compliance processes. Not only has FinTech proven to be a vital revenue source, especially in connection with lending or money transmission services, but it also helps entities cut costs, promotes good corporate practice in compliance management and enhances desired regulatory compliance outcomes. In particular, RegTech does this by enabling businesses to: automate ordinary compliance tasks, reduce operational risks associated with compliance obligations, enable compliance functions to make informed risk choices based on data provided insight, and create cost-effectives solutions to problems. Those solutions ensure that companies are up to date with the latest regulatory changes, minimize the likelihood of human error, and increase the overall governance process. Additionally, RegTech can prove valuable especially in identity management, risk management, and security, including from a corporate governance perspective, such as in cyber whistleblower or Bug Bounty programs.
Nevertheless, this article argues that RegTech is not a panacea for all corporate governance challenges. First, there are certain barriers to the adoption of RegTech. Second, RegTech alone cannot extirpate undesired and unethical business practices, or resolve ethical issues resulting from corporate culture. Moreover, technology can be used by businesses to evade regulations and frustrate regulators, a phenomenon referred to as anti-RegTech. Third, technology can hinder good judgment and human input in the governance and risk management decision processes, which operate based on opaque programmed reasoning that is often biased and reflects altered interpretations of the law. Fourth, given the high stakes, financial institutions must be careful when partnering with third party firms, and include regulators in the conversation before entering into such partnerships, especially given the increasing cyber risks. Lastly, many of the RegTech’s automation and efficiency gains have been offset by the costs of expanded regulatory requirements, such as the increasing number of information requests from regulators
Sound Recordings and Dignity Takings: Reflections on the Racialization of Migrants in Contemporary Italy
Get PDFIn the field of ethnomusicology, it is possible to consider musical collaborations—such as traditional fieldwork or joint musical projects between artists of different background—as spaces where different individuals and subjectivities share their own artistic practices and products, as well as the musical cultures of which they are representative or bearers. Such collaborations raise an array of methodological questions with implications to social justice and power relations. The aim of this contribution is to use the notion of dignity takings and dignity restoration to tackle some of these questions. While relying strongly on my own fieldwork in Rome and Chicago, I will also deal with works from ethnomusicologists who developed ways to combine collaborative efforts with the use of sound archives.
Central to my investigation is the figure of Badara Seck, a well-known vocalist from Senegal who has been active in Europe for about two decades. His musical collaborative projects both confirm and contest the racialization of so-called “migrant musicians” in Italy, that—I argue—can also be identified as a dignity taking. An interview with this expert in cross-cultural collaborations provided interesting insights into the ways in which musicology and discourse around music can involve both a dignity taking and dignity restoration. I will use his words to conclude by proposing strategies to address dignity taking and dignity restoration in the practice of ethnographic fieldwork
Dignity Restoration and the Chicago Police Torture Reparations Ordinance
Get PDFA recent municipal ordinance giving reparations to survivors of police torture in Chicago represents an unprecedented effort by a city government to repair damage wrought by decades of police violence. Between 1972 and 1991, white detectives under Commander Jon Burge tortured confessions from over 118 black criminal suspects on the city’s South and West Sides. Responding to the needs of affected communities, a coalition of torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, and community activists pushed the reparations bill through the City Council on May 6, 2015. Representing the holistic approach favored by survivors, the 100,000 each in financial payments; privileged access to psychological counseling, healthcare, and vocational training; as well as tuition-free enrollment in City Colleges for themselves, their children, and grandchildren. The ordinance also required the City offer an apology, erect a public memorial, create a community center to provide services for victims of police violence, and develop a public-school curriculum to teach the Burge scandal to local schoolchildren. Applying concepts developed by Bernadette Atuahene, this essay argues that the Chicago police torture cases represent a dignity taking designed to dehumanize and infantilize local black people. It also posits the 2015 reparations ordinance as a promising new precedent for dignity restoration in cases of police violence in the United States. Despite limitations of scope and scale, Chicago’s reparations ordinance models ways to include survivors of police violence in the process of repair, commemoration, and education
New Art For the People: Art Funds & Financial Technology
Get PDFFine art sales have reached record levels, with the global art market achieving annual sales of over $60 billion. However, the art market is extremely risky and the most lucrative investment opportunities are typically at the high end of the market. In recent years, financial industry professionals with an interest in the art world have increasingly formed art investment funds, intended to enable smaller investors to take advantage of the opportunity to invest in the art world and diversify their portfolios. Some art funds also allow art investors to borrow against certain assets. About 45 art investment funds currently exist, taking many different forms.
The art market is notoriously opaque and insular. On the primary market, only insiders have access to desirable works, and even basic information like price is typically confidential. And even on the secondary market, access is limited, and information remains scarce and unreliable. This cartelization and inefficiency often provides lucrative arbitrage opportunities to insiders with access and reliable information, even as they make it difficult for outsiders to profitably invest in the secondary market.
Financial technology (“fintech”) promises to transform the art market by providing access and information to retail investors. In theory, art funds could provide access to the art market by using crowdfunding platforms to sell shares in art portfolios, and use data analytics to identify promising art investments. Perhaps they could even create an “art index fund,” and enable retail investors to invest in the art market as a whole, rather than a particular artist or portfolio.
But in practice, fintech is unlikely to make art funds a wise choice for retail investors or most institutional investors. The promise of access and information is a chimera. Art world insiders typically have no incentive to give art funds access to the primary market, because plenty of private capital is available. Data analytics are useless without accurate information. And an “art index fund” would be like investing in lottery tickets, because only a vanishingly small number of works have any value on the secondary market, and even fewer increase in value. Unless the art market becomes more transparent, fintech probably has little to offer potential art fund investors
Dignity Takings in Communist Poland: Collectivization and Slave Soldiers
Get PDFPoland’s history in the 20th century could be a swell script of a movie. A country that had lost its independence in the 18th century regained it in 1918 only to fall prey to Nazi Germany twenty years later. After World War II Poland was under Communist rule that ended in 1989 with the fall of the Iron Curtain. In this paper we deal with dignity takings as defined by Professor Bernadette Atuahene that took place mostly in the early phase of the Communist era.
Creation of the Communist “brave new world” required total transformation of the society, sometimes referred to as “re-forging of souls” (perekovka dush). People who were reluctant to become enthusiastic adherents of the new social and political system or simply belonged to social groups stigmatized as so-called “class enemies” became second class citizens, doomed to extinction.
In this paper we show three distinct examples of dignity takings: young men from “class enemy” families turned into slave-soldiers, priests-in-training harassed and brainwashed during compulsory military service and farmers deprived of their land and forced to join collective farms. In order to present the process of dignity takings we use a top-down approach, starting with ideological justification of takings in the Communist doctrine, and then showing how this policy was implemented. Although we focus on the takings phase, some consideration will be given to resistance against dehumanization and denigration caused by dignity takings.
Finally, we show that the dignity takings method can be a useful tool for analysis of law and policy of totalitarian systems
Access Denied—Using Procedure to Restrict Tort Litigation: The Israeli-Palestinian Experience
Get PDFProcedural barriers which limit individuals’ ability to bring lawsuits—like conditioning litigation upon the provision of a bond—are a subtle way to reduce the volume of tort litigation. The use of such procedural doctrines often spares legislatures from the need to debate the substance of legal rights, especially when those rights are politically controversial. This Article presents a case study of this phenomenon which has escaped scholarly attention, in the intriguing context of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. On the books, a unique mechanism enables non-Israeli citizen Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to bring civil actions for damages against Israel before Israeli civil courts. Yet, since the early 2000s, Israel began using a host of procedural obstacles to restrict Palestinians’ access to its civil courts, effectively precluding their ability to bring claims arising from Israeli military actions. Through fifty-five in-depth interviews with lawyers, policy makers, plaintiffs, and other key stakeholders, alongside a host of secondary sources such as parliamentary protocols and NGO reports, this Article considers the impact this process has on Palestinians’ access to justice. While the use of procedure to encroach on an injured person’s right to compensation may be considered a taking of property, and thus, conceptualized as a dignity taking, such an analysis overlooks a key component of the harm caused to these individuals. Procedural restrictions that block access to the courts also deny Palestinians of their right to participate in the litigation process. Focusing only on property rights—the “end game” of the litigation—ignores benefits derived from the litigation process, including accountability, transparency, and recognition, which may be particularly important when it comes to plaintiffs from vulnerable, disadvantaged groups