In the effort to welcome the latest technology to the financial services sector it is important that the City regulator properly monitor outcomes for clients.
One of the great inventions of the late 20th century was the internet and later forms of digital communication.
This development has transformed our lives beyond belief, intellectually, socially and commercially.
Along with this is a dark shadow following these developments, ranging from the internet becoming a playground for the fraudulent and perverted; but it is the power of the new technology that has driven global financial development at a pace and in ways unimaginable in previous generations.
And, like with all new technological developments, there have been fears of what this would mean for future generations, the same kinds of fears expressed at the invention of the printed word to that of the internal combustion engine.
Sometimes, however, we have to take a step back: just as we are celebrating the wonders of what is still called new technology, most companies and businesses executives are now on the point of abandoning email for the quiet whisper in a dark corridor outside meetings rooms.
The fear of leaving an electronic footprint when we are operating in the shadows of legality or barely ethical business is now a major inhibiting factor.
In some jurisdictions, India and Germany, some senior civil servants have now resorted to using old-fashioned typewriters in order to escape the spies, hackers and investigators trawling through their electronic archives looking for evidence of wrong-doing sometime in the recent past. Lawyers are having a field day.
To make matters worse, just as people are becoming comfortable with avoiding sending messages by email that may later come back to haunt them, the City regulator has intervened on the sensitive matter of the use of social media.
Facebook, blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, driven by smartphones and other forms of electronic technology, have now become the gods of the secularised world. Blogs, on the other hand, present a totally different problem in that their use is not restricted to a character count and they can – and often are – used simply to express a point of view.
They also present legal challenges, none more so than anonymity, which make some of us who toil in the more traditional media shudder with fear. Quite often there is an appalling ignorance, or even neglect, of the law of defamation by some bloggers and the new media can often be used as a weapon of character assassination by a malicious few.
Despite all this, many of us still feel that some forms of social media can be a passing fad, like VHS and Betamax, which, in time, we will look back on as a footnote in the continuing advance of modern technology.
