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BofA's Seattle shake-up, board "refreshment" at a Phoenix bank and more in banking news this week.

The challenger bank for Black and Latino individuals introduced Elevate, a membership-only tier that includes access to private clubhouses and networking aimed at people of color.

Many U.S. companies — including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Apple — have drawn attention for increasing pressure on employees to show up more at the office as COVID-19 concerns ebb. Some credit unions have taken similar steps, while others still insist a hybrid schedule is better for recruitment.

Benefits under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act were applied to fewer than 10% of auto loans for active-duty reserve members, the agency found. It urged financial institutions to ease the process for accessing the law's interest rate protections.

Rushing to create a central bank digital currency that is not permissionless and private would be dangerous to core American principles, according to a Minnesota Republican.

Sen. Pat Toomey, who is retiring from his post as the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, attached a provision to the bill that would force the Fed to disclose account holders and applicants.

Coinbase Global waived fees for converting Tether Holdings' stablecoin USDT for the token Coinbase backs, as competition heats up among the three biggest issuers of such digital assets.

Sam Bankman-Fried missed the deadline set by a U.S. Senate committee for a response to a request to testify at a Dec. 14 hearing about FTX's collapse into bankruptcy.

The acting director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Himmamauli Das, said the so-called access rule of the Corporate Transparency Act will be released by the end of the year.

Santander UK was fined £108 million ($132 million) by the U.K. financial watchdog over repeated anti-money-laundering failures that included a series of missteps over its monitoring of hundreds of millions of pounds of suspicious funds.

While Silvergate said this month it has "a resilient balance sheet and ample liquidity," and analysts call its financials sound, the bank is today contending with a question as difficult as the one that led it to crypto in the first place: whether the experiment was worth it.

China and other countries are already working on their own central bank digital currency. Creating an American CBDC would ensure the dollar's place as a global reserve currency, a Connecticut Democrat writes.

Payment fintechs are finding that their best opportunities are overseas — and for a lot of companies, that means building a market to take on American incumbents.

After years of fintechs taking the lead in modernizing cross-border payments, fresh momentum is coming from traditional payments and banking infrastructure players, including the card networks and the 50-year-old SWIFT.

Citing a congressional report, SBA says it will investigate PPP operations at several fintechs, community banks and other participants. The review raises questions about plans to open up the agency's flagship loan-guarantee program to more nonbanks.