BankThink

Take care of your management team last, not the other way around. Vet new ideas through risk management and audit committees, not the marketing and sales department. Manage incentive compensation around risk-adjusted performance metrics.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, who took the post in 2009, will be leaving the agency next month.

After failing to push forward on any bills during the past two years, the Senate Banking Committee may finally be ready to reopen Dodd-Frank, writes American Banker's Victoria Finkle.

The first legal challenge to Dodd-Frank is baseless says the Department of Justice.

Bankers should be a resource for their communities beyond making loans and sponsoring little league teams. Here are a few fresh ways to get involved.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Breakthrough in MMF Debate: You might have missed this over the long holiday weekend: Charles Schwab is now backing reform of money market mutual funds. Specifically, the brokerage's CEO, Walt Bettinger, wrote in a Journal op-ed that his company would support requiring a floating net asset value for "institutional prime" money market funds. "Institutional" meaning funds whose shares are concentrated in the hands of relatively few holders, making them more prone to runs than more-distributed retail funds. "Prime" meaning funds that invest in riskier paper, like corporate obligations, making them more likely to "break the buck." The "nonprime" MMFs, which invest in safer stuff like Treasuries, could continue to report a stable NAV of $1 under Schwab's plan, as could "retail prime" funds, though the latter would be subject to additional oversight. (Funny how in MMF-land, "prime" and "nonprime" mean more or less the opposite of what they mean in lending.) Schwab manages institutional and retail prime funds, so its break from the industry pack to propose a compromise with reformers could be viewed as a "Nixon in China" moment. Or it could be viewed as Schwab blinking, given that the Financial Stability Oversight Council recently put its weight behind reform. The Journal's editorial board, which favors floating NAVs for all money market funds, nevertheless lauded Schwab's openness to change.

To prove and defend their capital adequacy, community banks must focus on linking the results of stress testing to the core principles that underlie Basel III's stand-alone ratios.

In this issue and next, Credit Union Journal is featuring Best Practices, so I’ve assembled my own Top 10 from SAFE Credit Union, beginning with the first five.

As more credit unions venture into the commercial real estate market, having an environmental risk management policy becomes increasingly important for many reasons.

This issue, Credit Union Journal’s Best Practices issue, seeks to be a Best Practice itself.