Opinion News from American Banker

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's recent decision to make it more difficult to see customer complaint narratives is depriving the financial services industry of a vital source of business intelligence.

An FDIC plan to help community banks evaluate potential fintech partners is valuable, as far as it goes. But it cannot account for the unique and specific risks that arise when two companies operate in partnership.

In the age of artificial intelligence and digitization, banks run the risk of looking homogenous. The differentiator will always be the willingness of bankers to work to engage with customers and communities.

Recent federal guidance stopped short of issuing rules for banks' artificial intelligence use, but bank examiners already have some tools they can deploy to make sure these systems operate safely.

Crypto is entering its "institutional era" as tokenized assets and stablecoins gain wider adoptions. The trade-off is that only companies that offer real utility to established institutions in the market are likely to survive.

U.S. regulators have made it clear that banks have the discretion to explain account closures, short of disclosing the existence of a suspicious activity report filing. They should make it mandatory.

Credit unions have long led banks on traditional customer service metrics, but they are currently struggling to match banks' digital service scores. The answer may be deeper collaboration with fintech partners.

Looking past the headline numbers, there are reasons to be concerned about the condition of the U.S. economy. Particularly troubling is the fact that large numbers of Americans live financially precarious lives.

Bankers need to understand that artificial intelligence services are increasingly used by customers shopping for banking services. The chatbots can be pretty unsparing in their assessments.

Lenders fronting the money for massive arrays of AI-friendly semiconductors have no visibility into their actual output. That could change with better reporting standards modeled after the energy industry.

Small banks are uniquely vulnerable to local climate disasters, from floods to wildfires to tornadoes. Supervisors should be playing a more active role in helping them identify, measure and manage their risk.

Just because apps can categorize your spending and provide feedback doesn't mean that those insights are always helpful, or even welcome. Some empathy needs to be built into their design.

Parties trying to restrict stablecoin rewards have been relying on a trio of false claims that, despite public debunking, continue to be spread. At some point, the repetition of fake talking points begins to look purposeful.

Banks are racing to adopt artificial intelligence while often de-emphasizing basic banking education — human intelligence — at the new employee, executive, and board levels. That's a recipe for disaster.

Artificial intelligence tools will certainly change the way the banking industry operates, but they won't eliminate the need to build your business on a firm foundation of care for employees, customers and shareholders.

Working at Federal Reserve headquarters on Sept. 11, Roger Ferguson knew he had to act quickly. But he was the only senior Fed leader in the country that morning.

Elizabeth McCaul was in Japan on the morning of Sept. 11. Which gave her one advantage: she had a working phone.

Donald Powell was sworn in as chair of the FDIC just two weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. Settling into the role was not going to be an option.

An agent that takes an unexpected action in the service of achieving its assigned goal can create vulnerabilities that may be difficult to spot in real time. These problems can compound if the agent continues to act within a bank's systems.

The section of the bill addressing stablecoin rewards is the product of a hard-won bipartisan compromise. Efforts to reword it would not only create confusion, but would seriously endanger its passage.