Call me a Luddite, but I have always agreed with former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker that the ATM has been the most useful innovation in finance of the past few decades.
So I will watch this week’s Senate banking committee hearings on fintech with trepidation. The hearings will be the first chance to dig into the Treasury department’s summer report on the sector, which talks approvingly of data sharing among technology companies and big banks to create efficiency, scale and lower consumer prices.
The report puts rather less focus on the systemic risk and predatory pricing that could emerge if the world’s largest technology companies and the biggest banks on Wall Street share consumer data. (Just imagine if your Facebook page had a checking account attached. What could go wrong?)