The Financial Services Bill – still in the House of Lords – has moved from committee stage to report stage – and I am continuing to champion the issues and put forward the amendments that I raised at committee stage. On Monday, 19 April 2021, several of these amendments (regarding open finance, digital infrastructure and […]
Category archives: Digital Technologies
Reforming the Computer Misuse Act: time to CyberUp
Cyber security has never been more important than it is today. As digital technology continues to advance apace and COVID-19 has prevented normal in-person interaction, almost everything in our personal and working lives has become digital. The CyberUp campaign highlights the way current legislation inhibits rather than promotes the important work of cyber security. As […]
Financial Services Bill Amendments: Digital ID and Other Digital ‘Infrastructure’
On day 6 (10 March 2021) of the committee stage of the Financial Services Bill in the House of Lords I put forward a large group of amendments under the broad heading of fintech. One important amendment would introduce distributed digital identification (Digital ID) and others would encourage digital operational resilience and the modernisation of […]
Financial Services Bill Amendments: Distributed Ledger Technologies
On day six of committee stage of the Financial Services Bill in the House of Lords I am putting forward several amendments – broadly under the heading of fintech – with two specifically designed to encourage the development of use cases for distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Following our departure from the EU it seems an […]
Financial Services Bill Amendments: Fintech Strategic Review Recommendations
Today (10 March 2021) on day 6 of committee stage of the Financial Services Bill I have tabled amendments that seek to implement recommendations from the Fintech Strategic Review. Ron Kalifa’s review for the government is a fine piece of work, engaging hundreds of experts across FinTech and financial services. It has excellent chapter heads […]
Financial Services Bill Amendments: Ethical AI
Today (10 March 2021) is day 6 of committee stage of the Financial Servces Bill in the House of Lords and I am putting forward several amendments dealing with various aspects of digital technology in financial services. Two amendments deal with Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the general principle of ensuring the ethical use of AI […]
A UK DARPA: Innovate the Future.
At a meeting, somewhere recently, with names not to mention and times unspecified, I was fortunate to hear, first hand, as to the UK opportunity for a DARPA style organisation. DARPA is, of course, the US agency that, for sixty years, has existed to ‘make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.’ The idea […]
Tax should not be so taxing
Tax, a temporary aberration has proven itself particularly permanent. Of itself, this is neither good, nor bad but we should surely be using every tool at our disposal to make sure our tax system works for the common good. Last week I was pleased to participate in a debate in the House of Lords considering […]
SolarWinds Cyber Attack
Today in the House of Lords the government was questioned on their response to the SolarWinds Cyber attack, first reported in December 2020. In the light of the attack I asked the government to again commit their full support to the UK cyber industry. The attack was one of the largest and most sophisticated cloud […]