Receiving Wide Coverage ... SoFi chief quits: Social Finance’s chairman and CEO Mike Cagney plans to leave the company he co-founded following lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and unfair work practices at the online lender. He will step down from the chairman’s role immediately and stay as CEO until a replacement is found. Cagney told employees that “negative press [has] become a distraction from the company’s core mission.” Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times
Wall Street Journal Preparing for the worst?: In the months before the massive data breach, revealed last week, Equifax spent more than half a million dollars to lobby Congress and federal agencies to get them to ease up on regulation of credit reporting companies, the paper says. Among the issues it lobbied for was limiting the legal liability of such companies as well as “data security and breach notification” and “cybersecurity threat information sharing.”
"Equifax may have displaced Wells Fargo as the new poster child of bad financial behavior for policymakers on Capitol Hill," according to American Banker. Meanwhile the Senate Finance Committee wants answers from Equifax Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith.
The Equifax data breach “could force some lenders to hit the brakes” on their lending goals, especially nontraditional companies that lend money online to customers mainly based on electronic credit checks. “Those checks could become less effective in weeding out someone putting in a loan application with a false identity,” the paper reports.
Moving on: Edith Cooper, head of human resources at Goldman Sachs and one of the highest-ranking black women on Wall Street, is leaving the bank at the end of the year. “In her nine years overseeing Goldman’s workforce, Ms. Cooper managed huge changes in recruiting and compensation as Goldman sought to refine its sharper edges and grappled with the fallout of the financial crisis,” the paper says.
Financial Times A long wait for Justice: Federal prosecutors filed a civil lawsuit against the former head of subprime trading at Deutsche Bank, accusing him of misleading investors about loans backing more than $1 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities that were issued before the financial crisis. The executive, Paul Mangione, allegedly participated in a “fraudulent and illegal scheme” that duped investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
What are they thinking?: Goldman’s plan to export its nascent consumer finance business to the U.K. is criticized by columnist Patrick Jenkins. “It is not an obvious move” and “defies a lot of logic,” he writes. The market is crowded, loan pricing is competitive, and deposits don’t come cheap. “The timing looks questionable, too.”
Early warning: Citigroup expects its third-quarter securities trading revenue to be down about 15% compared to the same period a year ago, “casting an early shadow” on upcoming quarterly results. Trading revenue was down 5% year-on-year in the second quarter.
Quotable “There are some really great tools out there, but the industry today mostly uses older [identification] methodologies. It could take years for the industry to catch up and move to new identity validation standards.” — Zach Perret, chief executive of Plaid Technologies, about the efficacy of electronic credit checks.
Isabel Casillas Guzman, administrator of the Small Business Administration, wants the agency to get involved in direct lending, a practice that was discontinued during the Clinton administration. Congress has not embraced the idea, to put it mildly.
GLS had already stopped issuing first-use plastic as of 2018, but it wasn't enough for the eco-minded German bank. Fake plastic still looks and feels like plastic.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is arguing that Colorado has the right to establish an interest rate cap that all state-chartered banks must follow. Three industry groups are suing the state in an effort to stop its attempted crackdown.
The Philadelphia-based bank's parent company, Republic First Bancshares, had been roiled by a yearslong proxy battle involving activist investors groups and its former CEO.
The Wyoming-based digital asset bank filed paperwork to challenge last month's district court ruling, which affirmed the Federal Reserve's view about its discretion over master account applications.