ODI Fridays: Routing around malfunction – can the financial system ever be open?

Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia and campaigner for an open knowledge society) once claimed that “The internet interprets any type of centralised planning as a malfunction and routes around it. The command-and-control model is doomed to failure here by the very nature of the network. This is inevitable”. Many of the pioneers of open data, such as Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman, have shared this vision. Yet the world of finance is still predicated on the command-and-control model. A small number of giant banks control the market in commercial and retail lending, the insurance world is dominated by a handful of large players, who alone have access to the corridors of central banks and regulators. Dean Buckner, a retired specialist at the Bank of England, explains how the secretive nature of regulation threatens, rather than supports, the stability of the financial system. About the speaker Dean Buckner worked at the FSA and then the Prudential Regulation Authority and Bank of England for nearly 20 years, specialising in asset valuation and capital modeling in both the banking and life insurance sector. After he retired from the Bank in January 2018 he set up Eumaeus.org with Kevin Dowd of Durham University, a project to ‘keep an eye on’ regulatory institutions such as the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority and to campaign for regulatory reform, particularly around the need for the financial regulatory system to be more open.