Federal Reserve Bank
of San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank
of San Francisco

Fintech Edge

This publication offers insights into how fintech is impacting banking and financial services and how bank supervisors think about risks and opportunities presented by financial technology.

  • Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Categories, Use Cases, and Considerations

    Kaitlin Asrow, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Spiro Samonas, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

    Information can provide unique insights to improve welfare, drive business innovation, and help countries navigate crises, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic. Unfortunately, the underlying data that are used to create information and insight, can also be breached, or misused, and require significant resources to manage efficiently and securely. Privacy enhancing technologies are a promising set of tools, techniques, and systems that can help keep data secure and private while still leveraging them to create value.

  • The Role of Individuals in the Data Ecosystem: Current debates and considerations for individual data protection and data rights in the U.S.

    Kaitlin Asrow, Fintech Policy Advisor, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

    We are living in a time of immense technological change, driven in part by our ability to capture data, convert it into new information, and use that information to inform decision-making, automate activities, and develop new products and services. Unfortunately, information can also be used to manipulate actions, discriminate on improper grounds, and open once intimate spaces up to unforeseen dissection and analysis. A growing range of stakeholders and policymakers are acknowledging the need to more proactively balance the benefits and risks of this data explosion, and there are robust conversations occurring across the country around the potential for improving and expanding U.S. data governance regimes.

  • The 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act: Understanding Its Implications and Ambiguities

    Kaitlin Asrow, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Joanne Xu, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

    Data privacy is quickly becoming a top-of-mind issue for consumers, businesses, regulators, and legislators following the steady stream of media reports about data breaches and data misuse. The United States has a patchwork of federal and state data privacy laws and statutes across industries, but the increasing focus on these issues has, in part, led to the development of new legal frameworks, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). The CCPA is prompting positive debate about how the patchwork of U.S. laws can be improved, but significant ambiguity remains.

  • Making Sense of Bitcoin Price Levels

    Joost van der Burgt, Dutch National Bank

    The virtual currency Bitcoin has received considerable attention in the past few years and more recently due to its price surge and subsequent volatility. At the end of 2017–in only a year’s time–the price of a Bitcoin increased about twentyfold to almost $20K. The sudden and unsteady changes in Bitcoin’s price beg the question–how do we consider its price levels? Given that an argument can be made that Bitcoin is a currency, a security, and a commodity, different economic theories might explain the evolution of its price.