US Regulations: OCC Puts End to State-By-State Compliance Mess
Attorney and Bitcoin advisor Marco Santori has hailed “the end of state-by-state licensing” following news that fintech startups will no longer face “patchwork” local compliance procedures. OCC Wants ‘Level Playing Field’. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced Friday that limited bank charters will be available for fintech companies. This, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said, would “level the playing field” in terms of regulatory compliance in the US. “It will be much better for the health of the federal banking system and everyone who relies on these....
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Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) is a 100-year-old trade organization for state regulators that primarily concerns itself with representing state regulators interests and dealing with issues facing the industry to federal and state authorities. One of their primary invitations is advocating consistent regulations among the financial industry from state to state. The organization announced a new focus on emerging financial technologies in February of 2014. They formed a task force for emerging payment systems whose purpose was to research and develop regulations for those new....
The Chamber of Digital Commerce will hold a two-day anti-money laundering (AML) compliance boot camp for bankers, regulators and digital currency companies. The event will be in New York City from April 30 to May 1, with an optional workshop on May 2. The topic of compliance and regulations is a tough one for Bitcoin companies. AML Know-Your-Customer and OFAC regulations are difficult for large and established companies, as seen recently when PayPal was fined $7 million by the U. S. Treasury Department for processing illegal transactions from blacklisted persons. According to the president....
State financial regulators in the US have received several inquiries about licensing bitcoin businesses, but few applications, it has been claimed. According to a report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the commissioner of banks in Massachusetts, David Cotney, claimed his state has only received one application to license a bitcoin business to date, with other states reporting similarly low figures. This news comes after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) made a statement back in March that any company trading digital currencies would be regarded as a 'money transmitter'. In turn,....
Despite the United States seeing much of the innovation and development of Bitcoin through 2012, it has not kept up in terms of trading volume. The multiple Bitcoin trading exchanges in the US that once existed have dwindled down to a single functioning exchange, Camp BX in Atlanta, whose low trading volume saw it removed from the CoinDesk BPI. An op-ed in the Guardian by Jerry Brito asserts that US regulations have caused this stagnation. Jon Matonis at Coindesk argues this is not a conscious decision but rather a mess of conflicting regulations at the state and federal levels. Startups....
Fred Wilson is a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures. USV invests in bitcoin companies, but not the currency itself. Fred is interested in bitcoin because he believes it can be and possibly will be the financial and transactional protocol for the global Internet. Here, he shares his thoughts on New York State's revised Bitlicense regulations. Over the past year, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), led by Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky, has been attempting to create a set of regulations for virtual currency services. They called this set of regulations the....