Penny Crosman

The Los Angeles fintech, which hosts a marketplace where people lend to one another, is moving forward and working to set up a "lending DAO" as it deals with questions about its tipping model.

After a decade of multibillion-dollar tech investments by banks, efficiency ratios have begun to improve and headcounts drop, some industry watchers say. Skeptics counter that other reasons are at play and that it's all hard to measure.

Their chatbots are diverting calls away from call centers and helping bring in deposits, the banks say, as the adoption, maturity and usefulness of the technology improve. 

"Animal welfare scores low in priority at many financial institutions" in the U.S., says Merel van der Mark, animal welfare and finance program manager for Sinergia Animal, an organization based in Brazil that has been maintaining a ranking of how banks around the world perform on several measures of ethics with regard to animals.

It's surprising given the cryptocurrency's volatility, but the New York Yankees, the Houston Rockets, MVB Bank and Vantage Bank are among the companies that have begun letting employees invest some of each paycheck in bitcoin in recent months.

Direct connectivity between the cross-border payment company and the data aggregator will let Wise's 13 million customers use the 6,000 fintech apps in Plaid's network without the need for a bank account.

SoFi and Qapital are among the challenger banks that are finding ways to make money, a rarity in a sector where most companies have grown customer tallies faster than revenue.

Banks that need to fill large volumes of jobs increasingly let AI decide who’s in and who’s out, based on analysis of digital resumes and video interviews. Algorithms can take a more inclusive and less biased view of candidates, but experts say there are several things to watch out for.

Silvio Tavares, the credit score company’s relatively new leader, is honing its models to be more inclusive, for instance by taking into account rent payment data and bank account data. 

The Onyx Digital Assets unit is the largest blockchain and digital asset team at a U.S. bank, and a window into what other large banks are likely to do in the future.