Opinion News from American Banker

As bank regulators work to create a more transparent and effective supervisory process, they should overhaul the process for appealing their rulings to include challenges to enforcement actions.

Banks want to reclaim their position as the central node in the customer relationship by charging fintechs and data aggregators for access to permissioned customer data. How the legal questions about this are resolved will be a telling moment for all concerned.

Well-regulated stablecoins will open the door to a wide range of financial activities, including 24/7 global markets for any asset class imaginable. Traditional banks should take note.

Noelle Acheson pulls the bill that would ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency into the spotlight and argues that it's overreaching, unnecessary and distracts attention from more pressing privacy issues.

Businesses accepting payments in stablecoins on a public blockchain are making vast amounts of data available to their competitors. For the technology to really take off, a privacy-preserving solution is needed.

The CFPB must unequivocally state that consumers own their financial data and prohibit financial institutions from monetizing access to it. No one, not even the biggest bank in the country, should dictate with whom consumers can share their data.

Theft of paper checks and their use in identity theft constitute a major blind spot in the private sector's fraud detection networks. Banks and regulators need to come together to find solutions.

Junk bonds made Michael Milken the most important and richest person on Wall Street. But they caused many large thrifts to fail. Had he listened to his professors and pursued his Ph.D. in 1970, his legacy might have been different.

Slashing capital requirements for the largest banks shows where the Federal Reserve's priorities lie — and it's not with community banks. This will make it even harder for small banks to compete with their larger peers.

We've just lived through a repeat of Operation Chokepoint, the federal effort to deny banking services to disfavored companies and individuals. We must know the full story so it can never happen again.

Noelle Acheson highlights how last week's White House crypto document and the SEC's announced Project Crypto are not just about supporting digital assets — they're also about an overhaul of traditional finance.

As stablecoins and related products gain traction in the U.S., bankers are going to have to face the fact that their current anti-money-laundering controls simply aren't up to the task anymore.

Banks would face much higher assessments to bring the Deposit Insurance Fund's reserve ratio into compliance. Those costs would be reflected in higher fees and reduced availability of credit.

The current system of communicating the terms and conditions of banking services fails everyone. Banks spend enormous resources on compliance theater while customers remain uninformed about their actual rights and risks.

Rather than deleting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now is the time for the president and Congress to reform and reboot it into the agency that carries out its mission in an apolitical manner.

The new age of AI-enabled agents and increasing connectivity will not reward financial institutions focused on the last wave of innovation. Latin American institutions must embrace new technology.

U.S. banks should look to Sweden, where the identity verification measures put in place by banks also give users access to both government and private-sector platforms.

Noelle Acheson outlines the key blockchain innovations for payment programmability, and highlights their advantages and their risks.

Proposed cuts to the Treasury's Office of Financial Research would deprive the government of vital insight into the financial markets at a time when the sector is experiencing major disruptions.

The groundwork for a system of international payments that bypasses the sclerotic SWIFT network has been created. Now the banking industry needs to get behind the switch to blockchain-based payments.