The Geneva Report has been published every year since 1999 by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) (a full list including each year’s theme and authors here) and is commissioned by the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies (ICMB), a research foundation affiliated to the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

This year’s report considers how advances in information technology are changing the landscape of financial services and how those advances may be changing the optimal scale of banks. It will also consider whether banks’ traditional advantages of funding through deposits and information gathering are being eroded by the presence of market-based institutions with access to cheap funds, by e-commerce platforms and by big tech firms with large established networks, which by analyzing purchase and payments patterns, can gauge users’ creditworthiness.

The authors of the report (Kathryn Petralia, Kabbage; Thomas Philippon, NYU Stern School of Business; Tara Rice, Bank for International Settlements and Nicolas Veron, Peterson Institute for International Economics and Bruegel) are asking for input from market participants.

To supplement the report, the authors are undertaking a short voluntary qualitative survey of market participants (banks, nonbank financial institutions, fintech firms, regtech firms, and bigtech firms).  This short survey seeks to gather responses about technology disruption in financial services, and its impact on competition, product offering and pricing, and developments in financial institutions’ relationships with customers.

The survey may be found here: https://bis.datacoll.net/iypxeyzyyo?l=en

More detailed instructions can be found here. For any questions: please reach out to tara.rice@bis.org. The authors would greatly appreciate market participants’ input and would be happy to share the survey results and draft paper when it is ready.

Please take some time to fill out this survey, it is vitally important to the future of the industry. Responses are requested by April 5.

As much impact that fintech has had on financial services in the past decade people still continue to make poor financial decisions. While it is great that consumers can now refinance their credit card debt or student loans to a lower rate this is not making much of a dent in the overall financial health of consumers.

Credit card debt continues to rise to record levels of over $1 trillion in balances outstanding according to the Federal Reserve. Outstanding student loans are now close to $1.5 trillion continuing a staggering rise over the past decade. The national savings rate is now back down almost to its record low set in 2005. We are borrowing more and saving less. And we seem to be blissfully unaware of the challenges this may bring to our lives.

We Don’t Need No Education

I have many friends who are not the least bit interested in finance. They go about their lives in ignorance of the some of the most basic tenets of finance. A few years ago I had a highly educated friend try to convince me that there was no need to ever pay off credit cards and that I should think of it more like a utility bill with a fairly constant payment, the minimum monthly balance.

We don’t teach serious personal financial management in schools so young people are left to fend for themselves or (hopefully) learn from their parents. I was lucky. In my case we talked about finance and investing regularly at the dinner table when I was growing up and it was something that always interested me a great deal.

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