BankThink

The new year will ring in developments in the ways banks use chatbots and other artificial intelligence, and produce digital products and services.

Regulators here made strides to encourage innovation in 2016, while Brexit cast doubt on the London fintech boom. Yet the cross-Atlantic payments battle is just beginning.

Corzine Settlement; Deutsche Fills Post; Student loans

Regulators here made strides to encourage innovation in 2016, while Brexit cast doubt on the London fintech boom. Yet the cross-Atlantic payments battle is just beginning.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Corzine settles: Former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine agreed to pay $5 million to settle Commodity Futures Trading Commission charges related to his role in the 2011 collapse of commodities brokerage MF Global Holdings, which Corzine headed. Under the terms of the deal, Corzine must pay the penalty out of his own pocket, not from insurance proceeds, "an unusual step that highlighted that the case was a high priority for the CFTC," the Wall Street Journal said. MF Global collapsed following a large bet on European bonds engineered by Corzine that went sour. Money was then allegedly improperly moved out of the firm. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times

A 2018 deadline to automate government payments is fast approaching. Only with a mix of technology solutions and cooperation among agencies can that deadline be met.

One of the designers who worked on Kasisto's chatbot Kai argues that technologists are perpetuating female stereotypes; SoFi has some unusual ideas about how to get to know its customers better; and Fidelity gives in to the ETF trend. Also, Cathy Engelbert, Barbara Boxer and Megyn Kelly.

We need more and bigger black-owned banks, not just a surge of deposits for a few institutions, especially if those institutions have not proven that they adequately serve the black community.

Any method for unwinding too-big-to-fail institutions that tries to avoid bailouts is a fool's errand. A more effective path may be reducing the size of TBTF banks or regulating them as utilities.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Too friendly?: Jay Clayton, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, "is expected to end the streak of aggressive regulators and litigators overseeing the country's top markets," the Wall Street Journal reports, describing Clayton in the headline as "a 180" from the outgoing chair Mary Jo White. The nomination of Clayton, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who has represented the likes of Goldman Sachs and Barclays, "signals Republicans prefer an SEC chairman who is attuned to the needs of Wall Street firms," the Journal added. That contrasts with the record of White, "a former prosecutor who presided over the SEC in a period when the agency collected record amounts of penalties and disgorged profits from wrongdoers." Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, American Banker