U.S. Bancorp might be well-recognized for its payments innovation strategy, but Dominic Venturo's title still raises a few eyebrows.

Financial institutions must make sure that any federal government regulatory changes involving general purpose reloadable prepaid debit cards are in the best interest of consumers, Frank Cotroneo, COO of NetSpend Corp., told attendees Monday at the 17th annual ATM, Debit & Prepaid Forum in Las Vegas.

Has the recession created a permanent culture of thrift in the United States? The answer, according to Timothy H. Murphy, MasterCard's group executive of core products, is a conditional yes.

This week the House Financial Services Committee will continue plugging away at a gigantic markup of the financial regulatory reform legislation it has produced. The committee will carry on with its debate over a proposed consumer products regulator and then move on to investor protection. If the past two days’ worth of markups is any indication, the partisan divide will dominate. Regulators will be busy this week too, with a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board meeting and appearances by Federal Reserve officials.

How would the insurance industry hold up under the scrutiny of a nationwide consumer protection regulator? If the partisan conflicts swirling around Capitol Hill continue to comingle reform issues, that question might be more than just hypothetical. Bickering over healthcare reform could be pushing Congress towards mandating a federal insurance charter.

Tired of hearing warnings that a new consumer financial products agency will hurt your local florist? Eliot Spitzer has a solution. He thinks you should complain to your pension fund or mutual fund about it.

The most powerful woman in banking, Heidi Miller of JPMorgan Chase & Co., was asked to weigh in this week on the succession speculation games playing out at several large banking companies.

Observers of financial regulatory reform have pronounced the effort to get new legislation passed this year pretty much dead. Even Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair doesn’t think it’s going to happen before the end of 2009. But Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is pushing ahead with all of the urgency—and confidence—in the world. This week (shortened by the Columbus Day holiday Monday) could see the first legislation relating to the Obama administration’s regulatory reform proposals reported out of the Financial Services Committee. But there are probably quite a few people who say they’ll only believe it when it happens.

Thanks to provisions in Tarp and the stimulus package, one man—the pay czar—gets a say on what bankers at firms receiving government aid get paid. But who is this pay czar? A moral grandstander like Eliot Spitzer? An Obama insider? As it turns out, Kenneth Feinberg is neither of those things.

Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is trying hard to convince Congress not to leave too wide a loophole in derivatives regulation, and his performance yesterday was itself a point towards his argument.

JPMorgan Chase’s Heidi Miller has made it clear that, when it comes to bankers’ pay, she won’t accept Congress’ populist pandering anymore. Miller, who is the chief executive of JPMorgan’s Treasury and securities services division, told attendees of U.S. Banker’s 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking dinner last night of an encounter she had with an unnamed member of Congress that left her “shocked” and “deeply depressed.”

While TD Bank’s “once-a-decade” systems failure last week might have a serious impact on its reputation for convenience and reliability, it also offered an unusual customer-service opportunity: managing a crisis almost exclusively through Twitter.

The nearly 350 community activists from Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America were headed to Phoenix, the second stop on a four-city tour to help distressed borrowers avoid foreclosure.

But Bruce Marks, NACA's CEO, would be staying behind for a few hours. He had just set up a meeting with executives at the bond powerhouse PIMCO — with, we think, our inadvertent assistance.

Ann Minch decided she’d had enough of Bank of America after the bank notified her it was raising her credit card’s interest rate to 30%--for no apparent reason. So she made a video and posted it on Youtube inviting viewers to join her in a “debtors’ revolt.”

This is a season of throwbacks: Economists claim the U.S. is experiencing the biggest downturn since the 1930s and now there’s art to match that comparison. A new Web site launched by the Independent Community Bankers of America hearkens to pre-war caricatures of greedy big bankers in its quest to promote the virtues of community banks.