BankThink

IT spending is on the rise - and that's not a bad thing. While compliance has dominated financial institutions' IT budgets for the last several years, this year paints a rosier picture with credit unions making larger investments in online banking and mobility - thereby enhancing the customer experience and increasing competitiveness.

Get ready. The year-end lists are coming. Top-grossing films. Richest people. Greatest inventions of 2013.

Tougher restrictions on job duties, zero tolerance from senior management and compensation structured around long-term incentives, among other things, will prevent the wrong people ending up in banking for the wrong reasons.

Bank buyers should be taking notes about the problems with HealthCare.gov. A bad online integration of an acquisition could send new customers to the door, or worse: to Twitter.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Yellen in Home Stretch: The Senate Banking Committee voted to confirm Janet Yellen's nomination for Federal Reserve chairman, and a change in Senate filibuster rules virtually guarantees she'll be confirmed by the full chamber. That change in parliamentary procedure — the "nuclear option" Majority Leader Harry Reid's been brandishing — will prevent filibusters for most presidential nominees. As such, it "represents a substantial power shift in a chamber that for more than two centuries has prided itself on affording more rights to the minority party than any other legislative body in the world," the Post notes. We're going to resist the temptation to go off on a tangent here, since this is American Banker, where the phrase "checks and balances" means something different than in the field of Constitutional law. So back to Yellen: In a Journal op-ed, former Senator Phil Gramm and economist Thomas Saving argue that the next Fed chairman will need an exit strategy for quantitative easing. (An economist critical of easy-money policies named Thomas Saving — what are the odds?) And in his Times column, economist Simon Johnson critiques Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser's recent proposal to place limits on the Federal Reserve, including its asset purchases and lender-of-last-resort activities. "Plosser is right to want to scale back the role of the Fed," Johnson writes. "Unfortunately, unless he also scales back the largest banks and the risks that they and other parts of the financial system can pose, his suggested solution would become a noncredible commitment," since the Fed would end up having to bail out behemoths again.

Rather than simply continuing to absorb the losses from account takeover attacks, institutions should be reevaluating the effectiveness of their authentication methods and increase security to better prevent fraud.

The House Financial Services Committee passed six bills on Thursday that would change several aspects of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Tim Howard, dismissed with former CEO Franklin Raines in late 2004, claims in a new book, "The Mortgage Wars," that the GSE was quite healthy — but was the victim of vicious attacks by a banking lobbyist group and regulators.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a final rule on Wednesday that merged mortgage disclosure forms in an effort to help consumers better understand the total costs of a loan.

"I would use this," Mom said, "if there was a place nearby that accepted it." Mobile adoption confronts the classic chicken-or-egg conundrum.