The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (‘FCA’) has now announced the participants in the second cohort of its regulatory sandbox, with the companies involved offering a range of ideas-based payment services and artificial intelligence software. In “The FCA Announces The Second Cohort For Its Regulatory Sandbox“, an article in Payments & FinTech…
Sourcing Speak
UK Government Publishes Statement on GDPR Compliance, Post-Brexit
The UK Government has published a statement of intent containing details of its proposed Data Protection Bill. The full text of the Bill is expected in September 2017, when the UK Parliament returns from its summer break. The Bill will enshrine the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) into UK…
Has the Era of the Consumer Class Action Waiver Passed?
Financial Institutions may need to revise consumer contracts to remove class action waivers in preparation for a March 2018 federal rule. On July 19, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal regulator for a sweeping range of depository and non-depository consumer financial services companies (including the largest of U.S.…
Outsourcing in the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sectors – a UK perspective
Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies operate in a demanding environment and face diverse challenges such as pricing pressure, increased regulatory requirements and mounting costs. With this backdrop, they have, starting with non-core functions, such as IT, facilities management, finance and human resources, before moving to secondary core functions, such as…
European Banking Authority (EBA) publishes draft recommendations for outsourcing to the cloud
The European Banking Authority (EBA) has opened a consultation on its draft recommendations for financial institutions outsourcing to cloud service providers across all cloud-related domains including infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service. The recommendations are intended “to clarify the EU-wide supervisory expectations if…
Keeping Your Airline IT Resilient
A number of major carriers have suffered high-impact IT events in the past several months. Estimates of losses in these cases have exceeded £100m. This is on top of (no doubt significant) remedial costs, reductions in share price and reputational damage. Such high-impact events are, in theory, unlikely to occur—the…
Is your supply chain free from human rights abuses?
In a global economy, every supply chain should have each link inspected to ensure it has not been forged in whole or in part in a manner that involves human rights abuses. In “Is your supply chain free from human rights abuses?,” a recent piece in Outsource, our colleague Tim Wright explores…
Next Steps toward Brexit
The European Commission has published its Brexit mandate with a clear focus on “citizens’ rights, the financial settlement and new external borders,” with the Commission’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, planning to “pay great attention to Ireland during the first phase of negotiations.” In his Next Steps toward Brexit Client…
SAP’s Licensing Time-Bomb
Software giant’s victory in “indirect use” case is cause for concern for companies worldwide. On February 16, 2017, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom held that Diageo plc, a global drinks company, was liable for unauthorized use of SAP software as a result of failing to secure…
Robots and Rule-makers
Recently, governments and rule-making bodies across Europe, the UK and globally, appear to be paying increasing attention to the need for the development of legislative and regulatory frameworks in the expanding field of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. With the growing use of these technologies across a wide range of…