BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Big brother: Credit Karma and Mint are ready to offer automated tax preparation services as part of new features "that will make them feel more like robotic financial advisers, tapping customers on the shoulder when they could make better financial decisions," as the New York Times puts it. Credit Karma said Wednesday it acquired AFJC Corp., an online tax preparation and filing company, and would begin offering its services, called Credit Karma Tax, in time for the 2017 filing season, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Legacy systems will be pressured in the year ahead to keep ahead of e-commerce, international regulations and other emerging risks.

There's no denying we are in a mobile-first era. But banks must overhaul their online banking to reap long-term profitability.

A Republican president and GOP-controlled Congress have the opportunity to disentangle the current regulatory web that leads to overlapping jurisdiction and duplicative rules.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Paying the piper: Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan reiterated that the bank expects to spend tens of millions of dollars on investigations and other regulatory matters in the wake of its phony accounts scandal. "I think that seems reasonable today based on what we know. It's the upper end of our range from an efficiency standpoint," he said at a Goldman Sachs financial services conference Tuesday. He also said the scandal could affect the bank's retail banking results this quarter as well as its submission next year for capital returns under the Federal Reserve's stress test and capital-planning process.

Mobile wallets can be the single location for not just cards, but a wide variety of financial and customer services that banks provide.

Although he has since walked back his original pledge to deport 11 million people, if President-elect Donald Trump attempts to fulfill his campaign promise, the damage to the housing industry would be substantial.

Rather than address systemic risk with impractical capital requirements, regulators can make a few subtle changes that will force the shrinkage of the largest banks gradually over time.

Large financial services firms are right to fight data-aggregation access, but they'll lose this fight to arguments based on innovation and "inclusion" if they do not quickly enhance their own value proposition.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Ho hum: World financial markets mostly shrugged off the results of Italy's constitutional referendum, which went down to defeat on Sunday, although the country's banks and its economy remain in serious trouble as a result. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times