Call for Self-regulation of Limited Network Payment Schemes

The UK Treasury is calling for self-regulation to ring-fence funds relating to stored value in “limited network” programmes, citing examples such as store cards, coffee shop cards, fuel cards, transport cards, membership cards, and meal and other voucher systems. The call is part of the Treasury’s consultation on the second E-money Directive which imposes similar obligations on the operators of 'general purpose' stored value programmes. While limited networks will remain exempt from E-money and payment services regulation, the Treasury will consider “whether further [regulatory] action is warranted” if what it sees as adequate self-regulation does not emerge. Consultation ends on 30 November.

Potential reasons cited by the Treasury for segregating limited network funds from operators' own corporate funds include:

• Apparent uncertainty as to the scope of the limited network exemption;
• A large number of consumers/businesses rely on limited network programmes and may suffer if programmes fail;
• A limited network failure may harm the reputation of other limited network programmes as well as regulated e-money providers; and
• Limited networks enjoy a cost advantage over regulated general purpose stored value programmes, partly through not needing to ring-fence funds equivalent to the outstanding stored value.

Whether each of these is really a problem is very much debatable. Guidance can clarify what is considered in or out of the regulatory scope, and the existence of 'grey areas' at the perimeter is no argument for definitively expanding the scope by requiring self-regulation. Of course, not all customers or businesses rely on all limited network programmes, or even the programmes of the same type. Similarly, the failure of one programme does not necessarily reflect on them all. That's clear from the collapse of retailers that entirely rely on pre-payment Farepak (Christmas hampers) and WrapIt (wedding gifts) which have provided the genesis for concern in this area generally, though neither was a stored value programme. Finally, why shouldn't there be cost advantages to running a programme whereby value can only be spent within a limited network, rather than one where stored value can be spent anywhere? The latter is always going to be much larger in scale and purpose, and entail far more operational risk.

While the evidence of detriment is less than clear, positive reasons not to introduce requirements to safeguard customer funds in limited network schemes include:

• The potential for additional requirements to be imposed in the course of the proposed self-regulatory exercise that needlessly increase the cost of operating the network;
• No one operating a dodgy scheme would sign-up for stringent self-regulation;
• It may be far more costly and onerous to ring-fence funds in certain types of limited network programmes than others, so some operators may be unfairly discriminated against by not signing-up on legitimate economic grounds; and
• Increased costs associated with self-regulation may result in fewer limited network payment programmes for customers to choose from and higher retail prices for customers overall.

A proportionate alternative might be to focus on improving the management of operational risk in businesses that rely entirely on pre-payment for specific items, as Farepak and Wrapit did. A nice, long chat with their auditors might also be in order...

Image from Newbusiness.co.uk

Animal Spirits: My £3 Billion Wedding

Hang on. This might just work. One hell of a Big Splash for the long-awaited wedding of William and Kate. Timed to occur hot on the heels of likely Spanish and Portuguese bail-outs. The more it costs, the better, since we're effectively paying ourselves to celebrate it, and it may also drag in £620 million. That's an impressive number, in terms of direct sales of copy dresses and cheap crockery, yet disappointing... unless the expression of public joy acts as a 'confidence multiplier' for a beleaguered populace.

Perhaps you can tell that I've been reading Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. Worth reading. Boosts optimism ;-)

Of Sunlight, Shadow Banking and Horizontal Intermediation

Huge thanks to Gillian Tett for pointing out in Friday's FT the report on "Shadow Banking" by staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It even comes with a handy map, which she points out:

"...is a reminder of how clueless most investors, regulators and rating agencies were before 2007 about finance. After all, during the credit boom, there was plenty of research being conducted into the financial world; but I never saw anything remotely comparable to this road map."

The NY Fed's report defines "traditional banks" as depository institutions that are insulated by public sector insurance from sudden 'runs' on deposits. Whereas "shadow banks" - finance companies, credit hedge funds, broker-dealers and an alphabet soup of intermediaries - operate without any such public sector insurance. I'll come to what shadow banks actually do shortly. But the fundamental problem, as the report makes clear, is that the shadow banking system has indeed gained access to the public purse during the financial crisis, via bail-outs of some of their subsidiaries (bank subsidiaries, in the case of 'financial holding companies' or retail/commercial banking groups; and industrial loan companies and federal savings banks, in the case of diversified broker-dealers or investment banks):

"The liquidity facilities of the... government agencies' guarantee schemes were a direct response to the liquidity and capital shortfalls of shadow banks and, effectively, provided either a backstop to credit intermediation by the shadow banking system or to traditional banks for the exposure to shadow banks."

In other words, public sector guarantees are necessary to stop 'runs' on the shadow banking system in the same way they avoid 'runs' on deposit-taking banks.

In these circumstances, you could be forgiven for thinking it crazy for the shadow banking system to go unregulated. But who are the shadow banks? What do they really do? Does each function really need to be regulated? If so, why? How? This has been the focus of the European regulatory agenda (including a focus on unregulated derivatives) during the past few years, and the harsher elements have met fierce resistance with allegations that the realities, wider implications and scope for unintended consequences are not well understood by legislators and regulators.

So the publication of the detail in NY Fed's report is very much worthwhile.

The NY Fed concludes that 'some' but not all segments of the shadow banking system are of "limited economic value". It says that "equally large segments of it have been driven by gains in specialisation" and would be more aptly described as a "parallel banking system." Nevertheless, the report concludes that "private sector balance sheets will always fail at internalizing systemic risk. The official sector will always have to step in to help."

So how does the shadow banking system work? Well, instead of making loans to hold onto them, like traditional banks, the shadow banking system involves the making of loans for sale through a series of intermediaries - "shadow banks" - each of which specialises in one step in "a vertically integrated, long, intermediation chain":

"These steps essentially amount to the “vertical slicing” of traditional banks’ credit intermediation process and include (1) loan origination, (2) loan warehousing, (3) [Asset-backed Security or ABS] issuance, (4) ABS warehousing, (5) ABS [Collateralised Debt Obligation, or CDO] issuance, (6) ABS “intermediation” and (7) wholesale funding... Typically, the poorer an underlying loan pool’s quality at the beginning of the chain (for example a pool of subprime mortgages originated in California in 2006), the longer the credit intermediation chain that would be required to “polish” the quality of the underlying loans to the standards of money market mutual funds and similar funds."

In reality, these chains could involve many more steps and "CDOs squared", depending on how many times the loans had to be "polished". The various exhibits in the report illustrate the eye-watering complexity very well.

Having studied the various processes, the NY Fed believes that "regulation by function is a more potent style of regulation than regulation by institutional charter." Figuring out which functions contain the root cause of our current financial woes is therefore necessary.

The NY Fed believes the current financial crisis grew out of mispricing of ABS CDOs, (steps 5/6 above), which caused problems up and down the chain:

"...the growth of ABS CDOs not only masked but also created an underlying pricing problem in the primary ABS market (Adelson and Jacob, (2007)). In particular, in the early days of securitization, the junior tranches of home equity deals were purchased by real money investors. However, these investors were pushed aside by the aggressive buying of ABS CDOs, which resided on the trading books of large broker-dealers. The mispricing of the junior ABS tranches permitted issuers to distribute loan pools with increasingly worse underwriting. ABS CDOs suffered from the same underlying problem as the underlying ABS, which required the creation of CDO-squared products."

In essence, poor quality debt was re-packaged again and again in order to remove the risk, but the risk was misunderstood and the resulting instruments were mispriced each time.

Notwithstanding these pricing problems, the NY Fed's regulatory vision is that vertical credit intermediation can reduce the costs of screening and monitoring borrowers in the traditional banking model, and facilitates investor diversification, by transforming credit quality, maturity dates and adding liquidity. And the grading of securities by a "credible rating agency" can reduce information asymmetries between borrowers and savers.

Yet this assertion meets a series of fundamental challenges, not all of which are explicit in the report:

1. The separation of lender and borrower, and fragmentation of the original loan note makes it harder to adjust loans when borrowers get into trouble (explored in Confessions of a Subprime Lender and evident from the 'fraudclosure' and 'forced repurchase' problems in the US).
2. The process of transforming 'maturity' (changing the date when loans or debt instruments are due to expire) creates balance sheet risk for the intermediary.
3. It is unclear whether ratings, accounting and audit functions really do remove information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders. Do we have "credible" ratings agencies, when only three dominate the market and they are paid by the issuers of the securities they grade? Similar problems exist in the accounting and audit markets - hence the calls for reforms in these areas.
4. There are huge challenges to undertaking adequate due diligence on large volumes of underlying original loans.
5. Pressure to reduce the amount of capital required to operate this vertical chain of intermediaries results in a game of regulatory, tax, capital and ratings arbitrage that spans the globe and creates endlessly complex corporate structures.
6. Various factors lead to underestimation of the capital required for the private and implicit public sector guarantees required to support it. This is further complicated by the fact that "...the performance of highly-rated structured securities... in a major liquidity crisis... become highly correlated as all investors and funded institutions are forced to sell high quality assets in order to generate liquidity."
7. The knowledge that the market can ultimately 'put' problem securities on the taxpayer (whether this is explicit, implicit, direct or indirect) creates a moral hazard that seems to increase in line with the demand for the securities until the system irretrievably melts down.

These fundamental challenges and the length of time it is taking to confront them underscore the need to find alternatives to the vertical model for credit intermediation. The situation is all the more urgent, given that the huge taxpayer bail-outs of the past few years have only reduced the liabilities in the shadow banking system from $20 trillion in March 2008 to about $16 trillion in Q1 2010, when liabilities in the traditional banking system were about £11 trillion.

One alternative is horizontal credit intermediation, which is a feature of the new peer-to-peer funding platforms - like Zopa, Lending Club and Funding Circle - that each borrower's loan amount is provided via many tiny loans from many different lenders at inception.

That approach does deal with the fundamental challenges outlined above, mainly because the margin between lending and borrowing rates are too slim to support more than one intermediary. The one-to-one legal relationship between borrower and lender/loan owner is maintained for the life of the loan via the same loan origination and servicing platform (with a back-up available), allowing for ready enforcement. The intermediary has no balance sheet risk, and has no temptation to engage in regulatory, tax or other arbitrage. Loan maturities do not need to be altered to achieve diversification across different loans, loan terms and borrowers. The basis of the original underwriting decision remains transparent and available as the basis for assessing the performance of the loan against its grade, as well as for pricing the loan on any resale or refinance, making due diligence easy. To the extent that credit risk were to concentrate on certain borrowers or types of borrowers, those risks would remain visible throughout the life of the loan, rather than rendered opaque through fragmentation, re-packaging and re-grading. The scope for moral hazard is contained by the transparency around loan performance.

This also reflects a trend towards the democratisation of markets that impact consumers.

But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Kick Out the Kick-out Bond

John Kay has seized upon the 'kickout bond' as an excellent example of how our creaking financial regulatory framework works against consumers.

John focused on the product as offered by RBS and distributed by Barclays Wealth, but even the Skipton Building Society is at it.

It is not possible to do the product any justice by summarising it in plain English. By all means study it yourself. But my reaction, like John Kay's, is to wonder why a retail bank or building society would offer an investment product with apparently massive bonuses when they can borrow money - or attract deposits - by offering very modest savings rates? If they've done their homework, this product should be very, very unlikely to cost them any more. In fact, the structure and layers of intermediaries involved should mean additional revenue based on fee and dealing charges and returns below the trigger for any 'bonus' payments. As Mr Kay says:

"Like so many structured products, these bonds are bought only by people who do not really understand what they are doing."

Why the FSA allows a product of this complexity to be offered to unwitting investors, yet refuses to provide guidance for the launch of simple, transparent, low cost funding platforms is utterly beyond me.

Remember: you're on your own - pay less, diversify more and be contrarian.

Avoiding The Irish Haircut

It seems that if you look into any property bubble you'll see the hollow remains of a British bank. Which explains George Osborne's offer of a direct loan from the UK to the Irish government.

It has been made clear by the German government recently that the holders of Irish bonds must take a 'haircut' - a reduction in the value of their bonds - to share the pain in the event that any European money is used to bail out Ireland or its banks.

To the extent that European money involves the European Financial Stability Fund, then the UK would be on the hook for £7bn. Chickenfeed, you say, compared to our own bail-out costs to date, though a sizeable sum in the scheme of recent budget cuts.

But that's not all that's at stake, because the usual suspects filled their boots with about £140bn of Irish assets, according to Channel 4 news tonight, of which RBS and Lloyds share about £80bn. So these positions don't need to take much of a haircut to exceed the UK's £7bn exposure via the ESFS.

Hence George's anxiety to avoid Ireland's trip to the Brussels barber.

What next? British banks were said to be 'tight-lipped' about the exposure to the PIGS. I'd say that's more like "white-knuckled" by now.

Image from Gals Rock.