The business case for real-time payments is not the opportunity to charge high fees. Rather, the payoff – which will take time – will come in retaining customers, lowering operational costs, and delivering timely financial insights to smartphone-toting customers.

Attendees at the recent White House fintech summit shined a spotlight on shared innovation challenges. To overcome them and help the U.S. make progress in financial services, we need to embrace these three regulatory reforms.

First Data has secured a partnership with Silicon Valley Bank, giving the payments technology provider and processor a front seat to take notes on all of the technology development taking place among the bank's clients.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem operates on the fringes of tradition, with "initial coin offerings" announced, discussed and carried out largely via online forums and without regulation. The phenomenon is high-risk and should be treated as such.

Credit scores are useful in predicting the likelihood of whether someone will repay a loan. However, banks and others need to provide customers with another number that more accurately assesses their financial health.

Chief Technology Officer David Reilly has had to make major reductions in traditional expenses so Bank of America can afford to collaborate with fintech firms that are developing innovative products the bank craves.

The U.K.'s referendum vote to leave the European Union has thrown cold water on London's reputation as a friendly venue for innovation in payments and other industries.

The recent White House fintech summit was helpful in exposing companies to regulators, and vice versa, but we need to strengthen the lines of communications even more.

Digital tools improve a bank's traditional sales process, but relationship-based banking is still a huge factor in winning over millennial customers.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is seeking to create a regulatory sandbox that it hopes will allow fintechs and banks to experiment on innovations to the financial system.

Contrary to doom-and-gloom attitudes of some about banks' ability to compete for millennials' business, the industry will build on its history of innovation to meet the technology needs of future customers.

Robard Williams, senior vice president with Moody's, discusses how the explosion of fintech companies – 4,000 by his firm's count – will help banks adapt to a digital world.

Community banks and credit unions have banded together to use their combined bargaining power to wrest better terms from what they regard as an oligopoly of core processing vendors.

The OCC might also open up an outpost "where the tech firms are," the Comptroller of the Currency said Tuesday.

A growing number of marketplace lenders and other fintech companies say they no longer use FICO scores or are using them in a limited way. The open question is whether their alternative methods will be more effective.

Nonbanks now set the digital banking experience bar, but in less than a decade large banks will have swallowed them up and will have become digital financial superstores.

Fintech companies are asking a federal regulator to create a specialized charter that would allow them to comply with federal rules instead of facing a state-by-state licensing framework.

With its very survival at stake, the San Francisco-based marketplace lender is balancing key priorities that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Throw Cathy Bessant of Bank of America a question about a hot tech topic, and she's got answers. Blockchain? She loves it but is still waiting for its use case. Patents? The law is making us be aggressive. Swift? A call to action. And that's just the start.

Fintech firms and banks should collaborate on using alternative data sources to qualify more borrowers for small-dollar loans.