Opinion News from American Banker

In a new paradigm of anti-money-laundering compliance, success increasingly depends not on obtaining information faster, but on recognizing when machine-generated intelligence should not be trusted.

Community banks have long been reliant on — and constrained by — a handful of core-banking technology vendors. But enterprise artificial intelligence licenses offer the chance to transcend those limitations.

Rather than replacing bankers, artificial intelligence is likely to amplify their impact: strengths as well as weaknesses. This makes investing in employee development more important than ever.

The policies most community banks rely on for cyber liability, fidelity bonds and directors and officers insurance are full of overlapping exclusions, restrictive coverage sublimits and vague specifications. That can become an expensive problem.

A primary criticism of stablecoins harks back to the era of free banking, when individual banks printed their own notes. But that era of private money bears little resemblance to the modern realities of stablecoin issuance.

As governors prepare to designate new "opportunity zones," lenders and investors should take advantage of the chance to target capital to communities where it will both do good and generate strong returns.

Banks can price in risk and manage their way around both left-wing and right-wing administrations. But the kind of uncertainty that arises from today's brand of politics is impossible to model.

As the regulatory landscape for digital assets becomes clearer, it is vital that stablecoin reserves, custody and settlement services, and the provision of liquidity not be concentrated within a small number of companies.

Efforts by individual states to rewrite existing rules governing interstate bank lending risk throwing the entire system into chaos. Only Congress has the ability to reestablish a workable set of national rules.

The new law's reciprocal and custodial deposit provisions recognize what the evidence has shown for two decades. They should spur, not substitute for, the broader work of protecting America's depositors.

The recently announced consortium of crypto companies behind OpenUSD, a new dollar-denominated stablecoin, will have to demonstrate that it can build partnerships with banks and intermediaries before it can challenge USDC and Tether.

Investors in a panic about private credit valuations need to draw a distinction between funds backing AI-threatened software companies and those whose collateral includes the hard assets of frontier AI companies themselves.

As written, new capital standards for U.S. banks fail to account for the additional risk posed by many home loan clients who obtain second mortgages. Fixing the problem will significantly reduce the rule's benefit to banks.

The only thing we know about the next financial crisis is that it won't look like the last one. But specific changes to bank safety and soundness requirements and clearer regulatory authorities would help us respond.

In the U.S., bankers are used to prescriptive rulemaking, and without it they seem uncertain about how to move forward with AI. Europe tried writing prescriptive AI rules, and they were a disaster. Now nobody knows how to move forward.

Just as internet connectivity destroyed the market for long-distance telephone service, blockchain technology is going to make high-margin transactions, like cross-border funds transfers, dirt cheap. Established players should brace themselves.

In the year of the country's 250th anniversary celebrations, it's worth looking back at the long road the U.S. dollar took to global dominance, and the lessons we can learn from it.

To thrive in the new age of real-time payments, banks must invest in a continuous operating model that integrates payments, treasury and working capital into a seamless ecosystem.

A new consumer wellness trend, peptide treatments, is rapidly gaining popularity, and is inevitably going to cause problems in payments as banks and payment processors try to assess which providers are legitimate.

Washington, D.C., may be the epicenter of the nation's birthday celebrations, but the financiers, financial institutions and city that funded it deserve some attention, too.