Topic: Fed Gets New Payments Security Head, Bitcoin Gets More Scrutiny (Read 136 times)

Last week it was announced that Kenneth Montgomery, who serves as first vice president and chief operating officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, had been named to helm the central bank’s fraud and risk operations tasked with boosting the security of the nation’s payment system, writ large. He will be chairman of the Secure Payments Task Force, the Federal Reserve System said..

Looking overseas for other headlines, we find that small businesses in the U.K. may face rough sledding in as the General Data Protection Regulation comes to pass next year. Zurich, the insurance company, said that research shows that many SMBs would have to pay out “significant fines,” as they are unaware of the mandates tied to the new legislation..

Among those mandates are data protection employment requirements stipulating that businesses also have data protection specialists on staff. Other measures in the legislation would enable the central bank to govern virtual currencies such as bitcoin..

Similarly, Indonesia’s central bank has issued its own mandates tied to cryptocurrencies, as the authority said that it is looking into whether trading of those currencies should be regulated. Looking ahead to PSD2, theregister.com reported last week that “poorly written code” is putting banks at risk for bad actors to gain access to financial firms’ systems, with possible harm to end customers and even theft from accounts..