The five-member board voted unanimously to flesh out how the policy will work when a systemically important company fails. But this show of unity may be misleading and fleeting.

Janet Yellen has made it clear she wants to move the Federal Reserve away from a bank-centric regulatory model to one that appropriately tailors rules to the nonbanks that it now regulates.

When Sterling Bank rebranded following the financial crisis, we conducted focus groups with customers and employees. Engaging these groups ensured that any new or refined messages were believable and authentic to the organization.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Final Lap for Volcker Rule? A final version of the Volcker Rule, arguably the most controversial element of the Dodd-Frank Act, is expected to be approved by the five U.S. federal banking regulatory agencies today. The law is meant to prevent banks from engaging in risky trading for their own accounts, considered a factor in the downfall of some Wall Street firms in 2008. (A more modern example is JPMorgan Chase's London…

A ban on portfolio hedging would perfectly illustrate the current practice of regulatory ‘populism’ that has pervaded financial regulatory reform since the crisis.

New York's Benjamin Lawsky and other state regulators have given no indication of differentiating between online lenders that operate well and those that don’t. Yet the spectrum of alternative lending operations indicates that just such a distinction is needed.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Sons and Daughters: Documents, including spreadsheets and emails, shine some light on how hiring the children of prominent businesspeople in China may have helped JPMorgan Chase land business with state-controlled companies. For example, in one email a senior JPM banker in Hong Kong writes, "You all know I have always been a big believer of the Sons and Daughters program — it almost has a linear relationship" with winning assignments. JPMorgan handed…

These types of schemes rarely pay off in the end, and they certainly never represent an efficient use of funding. Banks would, therefore, be well-advised to make some immediate price-structure changes.

Reduced lending, fewer leaders in times of crisis and less innovation – that’s what we’d have if only the biggest banks were allowed to survive.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Waiting for Volcker: News on the contents of the Volcker Rule continues to trickle in ahead of next week's vote on the long-awaited Dodd-Frank provision. The Journal reports that the rule will require bank executives to guarantee their firms are in compliance with the regulation, which, incidentally, marks another requirement banks lobbied against that wound up in regulators' final proposal. Meanwhile, an unnamed senior Treasury official tells the FT the rule will…

Nacha says the industry wants faster processing and is “working to make it happen in a way that is a win-win for all.” The biggest banks are in no rush.

As consumer groups turn their attention to smaller institutions, they bring lending disparities to regulators’ attention. The regulators seem to take these issues more seriously than during bank megamergers’ heyday.

There seems to be undue emphasis being placed on a provision that, generally, would have done nothing to avoid the recent financial crisis. Ultimately, however, the Volcker Rule has to be judged like any other regulation: do its benefits outweigh its costs?

Receiving Wide Coverage ... On the Regulatory Horizon: An anonymouse tells the Journal that the forthcoming Volcker Rule won't allow banks to use "portfolio hedging," thanks to JPMorgan Chase's whole "London Whale" debacle. "Regulators, in response to [JPM's disclosure its trades were a hedge], pushed to write a rule that would ensure banks couldn't engage in such trades," the paper reports. "The move will come as a blow to banks, which lobbied regulators to keep language…