BankThink

Even before Dodd-Frank, federal regulations had grown exponentially. The sheer quantity of the regulations is bad enough, but the complexity often confuses banks and their customers and increases compliance costs.

Ten years from now, today's brick-and-mortar banks, and digital banking services, will look like quaint vestiges of a bygone era.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Wow, what a morning. Scan is still trying to decide whether today's confluence of events out of Washington and Wall Street is poetically just, ironic or just plain spooky. A flood of headlines centered on finalization of the Volcker Rule, a congressional budget deal and the fifth anniversary of Bernard Madoff's arrest. That's a big agenda, but, for brave readers and those who had to get their kids to school early, let's have at the most important matters:

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 Whale incident, which resulted in a $6 billion loss for the bank.) Some say the Volcker rule, which was first announced in January 2010, is too tough, others that it's not tough enough.

The FTC's goal of compensating victims of merchant fraud is laudable. But effectuating that goal through a "crackdown" on processors and ISOs, which effectively makes them insurers of merchant fraud, seems misguided.

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.