BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...OCC seeks data: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has sent formal letters to large and regional banks it regulates seeking information about their sales practices and incentive-compensation plans following the Wells Fargo scandal. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Santander USA were among the banks getting letters. Comptroller Thomas Curry told the Senate Banking Committee last month the regulator will "review the sales practices of all the large and midsize banks the OCC supervises and assess the sufficiency of controls with respect to these practices."

Neither bank regulators nor banks' risk managers can afford to wait until rating agencies downgrade Deutsche before understanding the level of exposure they have to the German bank giant.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Court hears SIFI appeal: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard arguments from the federal government on Monday that MetLife is a "systemically important financial institution" and requires stricter regulation. The Financial Stability Oversight Council voted in December 2014 that the insurance company was a "SIFI" but was overruled by a U.S. district court judge earlier this year. The FSOC is now appealing that decision. "Beyond issues related to MetLife directly, the case holds broader significance," the Wall Street Journal commented. "The ability to bring large financial companies such as MetLife under tougher rules was an important piece of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul. The law created the council to … tag financial companies for stricter oversight if it determined their failure could put the broader economy at risk." Wall Street Journal, American Banker, New York Times

The technology behind bitcoin has almost endless use cases.

To land and retain millennial customers, mobile banking apps must graduate from simply replicating online banking on a phone to leveraging the native functionality of mobile hardware.

Breaking News This Morning ...Discount brokers to merge: TD Ameritrade is buying rival Scottrade for $4 billion. The combined company will have $944 billion in client assets and execute 600,000 client trades a day. TD says the merger will enable the two companies to cut costs by $450 million a year. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times

The U.S. migration has passed the one-year mark, but more key dates are on the horizon.

We are still in the early days of digital finance — but the heated tone of conversations surrounding approaches to data access threatens to keep us there.

Even if the cross-selling scandal is unique to Wells Fargo, banks nationwide will need to prepare for added regulatory scrutiny. Here's how.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...More pressure on Wells: Two Democrat senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, asked Wells Fargo's chairman if the board had sufficiently questioned Timothy Sloan about his knowledge of the bank's phony accounts scandal before appointing him chief executive officer. "It is difficult to believe that he had no knowledge of or bears no responsibility for the actions of thousands of Wells Fargo employees creating fake accounts," the senators' letter to Wells Chairman Steven Sanger said. "We continue to have questions about who is being held accountable at Wells Fargo."