The Global Risks Alliance (GRA)
Financial technology, digital platforms, innovation-related vulnerabilities and professional learning. Fintech Nexus is an established platform published by The Global Risks Alliance.
Fintech F1 · Week 10
| Women | 59 | 5 | Review |
| Rural | 39 | 8 | Review |
| Under 25 | 39 | 7 | Review |
Fintech Nexus · Fintech risk and operationsFintech risk and operations, in outline: domain structure with placeholder names and illustrative values, not a record.
Fintech risk is the risk that financial technology, from instant payments and open finance to tokenised ledgers, AI and digital identity, introduces new failure modes or concentrates old ones. Fintech Nexus, The Global Risks Alliance's platform for the field, treats technology as a source of both risk and resilience; it assesses, certifies or endorses no provider.
Fintech researchers; payments innovators; risk technologists; regtech specialists.
Digital operating risk; product governance; model evaluation.
Fintech resilience guides; digital-risk research.
How a failure at one financial centre can spread through settlement links. Design links, not real dependencies.
New payment services and resilience.
TopicData portability, privacy and access.
TopicDigital market infrastructure and risks.
TopicFinancial model and decision risk.
TopicOnboarding, fraud and exclusion.
TopicCloud, cybersecurity and vendors.
TopicCompliance technology as research.
TopicAccess, SMEs and equitable design.
TopicDigital asset and tokenization research without exchange or custody.
The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.
| Framework or standard | Body | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| CPMI-IOSCO Principles for financial market infrastructures (PFMI) | CPMI and IOSCO | Risk management, governance, settlement, operational risk and access standards for payment systems, securities settlement systems, central counterparties and trade repositories |
| Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) | European Union | ICT risk management, major incident reporting, resilience testing and oversight of critical ICT third-party providers for EU financial entities |
| Principles for operational resilience | Basel Committee on Banking Supervision | Expectations for banks to identify critical operations, set tolerance for disruption, map dependencies and manage third-party and ICT risk |
| FATF Recommendations, including Recommendations 15 and 16 | Financial Action Task Force | Standards for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, risk-based due diligence, virtual asset rules and the travel rule for transfers |
| Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and open banking standards | European Union and EBA; UK Open Banking Standard; Berlin Group | Licensing of payment and account information services, strong customer authentication and secure interfaces for third-party access |
| ISO 20022 financial services messaging | International Organization for Standardization, TC 68 | Common methodology and message definitions for payments, securities and other financial messaging |
| NIST Cybersecurity Framework | National Institute of Standards and Technology | Outcomes to govern, identify, protect, detect, respond to and recover from cyber risk |
| Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) | European Union | Authorisation, disclosure, reserve and conduct rules for crypto-asset issuers and service providers, including stablecoin issuers |
| G20 High-Level Principles for Digital Financial Inclusion | G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) | Principles for digital approaches to inclusion, balancing innovation and risk, consumer protection, literacy and measurement |
| High-level recommendations for crypto-asset activities and global stablecoin arrangements | Financial Stability Board | Regulation, supervision and oversight of crypto-asset activities and stablecoins on a same activity, same risk, same regulation basis |
Fintech Nexus is The Global Risks Alliance's platform for financial technology as a source of both risk and resilience: payments, open finance, tokenised infrastructure, digital assets, AI, identity, regtech and inclusion. Its pages set out how technology, operational, cyber and conduct risk develop and propagate through finance, the data that measure them, the standards they are read against and the institutions that decide. Its view is shared industry understanding, never investment advice.
Instant, card, cross-border and wholesale payment systems, and their settlement, liquidity and continuity under stress.
Data portability, interfaces, consent and liability when customers share financial data with other providers.
Tokenised money and securities, stablecoins and crypto-asset markets, and their links to regulated finance.
Machine learning and generative models in credit, fraud, trading and operations, and the governance of model risk.
Customer identification, authentication, fraud at onboarding and the exclusion that rigid checks can cause.
Cloud, third-party, cyber and change risk, and the ability to keep important services within tolerance.
Compliance and supervisory technology, regulatory reporting, sandboxes and the evidence of their effectiveness.
Access and use for individuals and small firms, agent networks, digital credit and equitable design.
Finance has always run on technology, but the past two decades changed its structure. Payments clear in seconds through mobile wallets and instant payment systems; lending decisions are made by models trained on alternative data; banks and fintechs share customer data through application programming interfaces; core systems run on a small number of cloud providers; and distributed ledgers support new forms of digital assets. Each change brings real benefits, from lower costs to wider access, and each creates new dependencies.
Those dependencies change how failures spread. An outage at a widely used cloud or payment processor can stop services at many institutions at once. A flaw in a widely used model or software library can be replicated across firms. Faster settlement removes the time buffers that once allowed errors and fraud to be caught. Digital runs, where depositors move funds at the speed of an app, can drain liquidity faster than traditional supervision anticipated. Fraud migrates to the weakest point in a chain of interconnected services.
Innovation also raises questions of fairness and inclusion. Digital identity requirements can exclude people without documents; automated credit decisions can encode bias; and the benefits of open data depend on privacy and consent being real. Understanding these risks requires engineers, risk managers, economists and compliance specialists to work from a shared picture.
Fintech Nexus builds shared industry understanding of digital operating risk, product governance and model evaluation. It publishes research that institutions, supervisors and researchers can use to understand risks in common, not advice on what any of them should do.
Research-based guides to operational, cyber and third-party risk in digital finance, describing practice without endorsing products.
Studies of how technology changes risk transmission, inclusion and market structure.
Material for practitioners on the risks and governance of financial technology.
GRA is a nonprofit business league for the financial services industry. It does not lend, underwrite, rate, invest, advise on or arrange transactions, and readiness work is not approval. Competition safeguards are designed and set out in a written policy that counsel reviews before membership opens.
Digital market infrastructure and risks, with digital assets risk research without exchange or custody.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Fintech | Technology-enabled innovation in financial services that can create new business models, applications, processes or products, as the FSB describes it. |
| Instant payment | A payment settled to the payee within seconds, at any time of day, every day of the year. |
| Tokenisation | Recording claims on money, securities or other assets as tokens on a programmable ledger. |
| Regtech | Technology firms use to meet regulatory obligations, such as monitoring, screening and reporting. |
Every claim on Fintech Nexus rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.
A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organized community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.
Fig.The Nexus cycle on this platform, from question to renewal. Design, not a record of a run.
GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Fintech Nexus links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.