Claire Brownell’s beat expands to include fintechs, financial regulation, and how banks and other financial services companies are responding to technology. Read more in this note to staff from the newsroom’s managing editor, Jordan Timm:

I’m delighted to announce that Claire Brownell’s beat is expanding beyond her agenda-setting work on digital assets, and is taking on a new focus.

Claire will cover the future of finance, and how the financial system is adapting to technological change. As part of her beat she will cover fintechs, financial regulation, and how banks and other financial services companies are responding to technology and the increased competition it makes possible.

She will continue to cover cryptocurrency and other digital assets as part of this beat.

Claire’s coverage will also explore the ways in which companies we don’t think of as financial services firms, including tech giants such as Shopify and Amazon and more traditional businesses such as Tim Hortons, are increasingly offering financial services.

This beat will build on The Logic’s reputation as a go-to source for coverage of regulatory and policy issues in the Canadian financial system. She will cover open banking, the long-delayed Real-Time Rail, the Bank of Canada’s new role overseeing retail payments companies, and how securities regulators and other financial regulators are responding to emerging issues such as artificial intelligence.

She will also cover how these changes affect people and small businesses, who feel the impact of issues like access to credit, data privacy and the stability of the financial system.

Claire is moving into this expanded role effective immediately. Please join me in congratulating her.

– Jordan