BankThink

Bankers do not select the people who regulate them. To work, our system requires smart and prudent regulators as much as it requires smart and prudent bankers. Confirmation hearings should help us find out if Janet Yellen will be such a regulator.

It was just a decade ago that about one-in-10 interactions in branches at banks and credit unions revolved around resolving a customer/member's problem. A missing payment. Lost credit card. PIN is a pain.

Auto leasing is all the rage in these rapidly changing economic times.

New York Fed President William Dudley is suggesting that regulators could force banks to withhold a big chunk of executives' annual pay and then use that money to fill holes in capital when trouble hits.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

Traditional risk management works well when only profits are at stake. To protect against the dangers that can sink an institution, a new approach is needed.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...The Bird Is the Word: The Morning Scan is as sick of hearing about the Twitter IPO as you probably are, but it still dominates business news pages this morning. The social network's shares jumped nearly 75% on their first day of trading, in sharp contrast to the Facebook debacle last year. Hence the FT's take: "Tech industry enters new era with Twitter's IPO success. … The shadow of Facebook's troubled IPO has finally passed from the financial markets. … [An]y number of tech hopefuls are now lined up to cash in. … Twitter appears poised to become both symbol and catalyst for a new tech investment mania." That was enough for us, but if you want more Twitter coverage, there's plenty in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Fast Company

Microsoft's Larry Hryb, known to gamers as Major Nelson, recently posted a six-second video demonstrating how the company's new Xbox console redeems codes for games and subscription services. It's six seconds that many in the payments industry should watch.

Harvey Rosenblum, the former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has cultivated one of the most public profiles among rank-and-file regulators in the "too big to fail" debate. In an interview with editor-at-large Barbara Rehm, he let loose– and his views might surprise you.

If there is any chance a Basel Committee standard could apply to community banks, U.S. regulators need to make every effort to consult with these institutions before agreeing to it.