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American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and our social media platforms.
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On the likelihood of interest rates remaining historically low for the foreseeable future:

"Time to rethink bank revenue; banks cannot 'expense cut' their way to sustainable performance. Integrated revenue opportunities need to be seriously considered as an alternative to interest income. Banks have data and transactional intermediation, time to put those to work."

Related Article: The Days of Huge Fed Rate Hikes Are Over

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On the threat banks face from big tech companies as opposed to smaller fintech startups:

"Big tech is coming — one merely needs to look East — to Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu — to see the future of financial services."

Related Article: The Real Fintech Threat Isn't from Startups

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On the possibility of financial aid or even tuition being priced based on students' ability to land and keep a job:

"The real issue — the one that no one is addressing — is how do we finance post-secondary education. There's got to be a better way. Our world needs social workers and teachers and musicians and artists — their ability to pay will never be the same as engineers and STEM professions."

Related Article: Income-Based Finance Could Teach Education a Lot About Markets

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On Wells Fargo's creating an application programming interface so customers can pour their data into Xero's accounting software:

"Unfortunately, most retail consumers are computer/scripting illiterate and … are locked into whatever abomination their bank has supplied them. I cannot stand the state of financial institution data exchange with the consumer — it is all monopoly vendor lock-in."

Related Article: Wells Fargo's Bid to Vanquish Screen Scraping

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Another response to Wells' API announcement:

"APIs are not rocket science. Why did this take 20 years?"

Related Article: Wells Fargo's Bid to Vanquish Screen Scraping

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On the threat big banks face from cyberattacks targeting their enterprise-wide systems:

"You need to assume that attacker will be able to get through your firewalls, etc. by one or another way sooner or later. You are improving firewalls — they are developing new ways to attack. The solutions is to address application security problems, so the attacker can do very little to none damage to the system or software when is getting through the firewall."

Related Article: Will a Cyberattack Cause the Next Big Bank Failure?

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In response to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's using a 36% APR threshold in its payday lending proposal:

"There has been no analysis by the CFPB on 36% APR and it should not promote a pricing structure that is 70 years old. If wages, benefits, rent, insurance, utilities and compliance costs were at 1943 levels then things would be different."

Related Article: Why the CFPB's Sweet Spot for Installment Loan APR Is 36%

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