Eugene Grygo, chief content officer, FTF News
In case you were wondering, LabCFTC, the CFTC’s FinTech initiative, is asking the public for ideas and subjects for innovation competitions “to advance the agency’s FinTech goals,” and to help the regulator advance its array of IT tools.
“We launched the LabCFTC initiative to stimulate and promote market-enhancing FinTech solutions,” says CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo, in a prepared statement. “By soliciting feedback from innovators on how the CFTC can best encourage innovation and leverage FinTech and RegTech solutions for the marketplace, we are not only fulfilling the mission of this initiative, we are moving the CFTC closer to my ultimate goal of making the agency a 21st Century regulator.”
The process begins with the LabCFTC Request for Input (RFI), which was published in the Federal Register on April 25.
The RFI serves as the means for LabCFTC staff to gather feedback on how “innovation competitions can stimulate innovation and make the CFTC more effective and efficient in satisfying its mission to foster open, transparent, competitive, and financially sound markets,” officials say.
Specifically, the CFTC wants public feedback on focus areas for potential innovation competitions and how “competitions could best be structured and administered to maximize their impact,” officials say. “While the RFI raises the possibility of competitions focused on data visualization tools, machine-readable regulatory rulebooks, and ‘smart’ notice and comment systems, it seeks to crowdsource what may be the most promising topics directly from the innovator community.”
The Science Prize Competition Act of 2015 allows the CFTC to hold a competition and award prizes, “such as non-monetary prizes and prizes in partnership with external organizations, in order to stimulate innovation designed to advance the goals of LabCFTC,” according to the regulator.
Innovation competitions and crowdsourcing efforts on “priority” RegTech subjects “can unleash creativity, ingenuity, and new technologies that can solve challenges that benefit the American public,” says LabCFTC Director Daniel Gorfine, in a statement. “Our ultimate goal is to focus the energy of America’s innovators on ways to improve our agency and our markets so that we can keep pace with a rapidly digitizing world,” Gorfine adds.
Launched last year, LabCFTC is focused on “market-enhancing financial technology (FinTech) innovation, fair market competition, and proactive regulatory excellence and understanding of emerging technologies,” according to the regulator. “LabCFTC is designed to make the CFTC more accessible to FinTech innovators, and serves as a platform to inform the Commission’s understanding of emerging technologies.”
All suggestions must be sent within 90 days of publication of the RFI in the Federal Register, officials say.
More information is available here.
Need a Reprint?