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Is being customer-centric a goal at your bank? You’ll need to master these five practices to align employee behavior with your desire to improve the customer experience.

Swipe Fees Battle Renewed; Soured Mortgages Remain

American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and our social media platforms.

Merchants have long sought to change how the card networks charge fees, and are getting a new chance after more than a decade of court squabbles.

Initial coin offerings are the latest fad for many emerging cryptocurrency companies and projects. From the recently completed Lisk, Waves and Mycelium coin offerings to the historic crowd sale by the DAO – which was subsequently hacked for about $60 million – to Bitland, Project Decorum, Elastic Project and a good number more sales, the trend is clear.

The decision by a federal appeals court to toss out a blockbuster settlement between retailers and the card networks could re-expose some banks to legal liability and threaten their already challenged interchange income.

The bitcoin blockchain poses a negligible competitive threat to legacy institutions, but the technology could open up new markets for financial services, says a new report by Citigroup equities analysts.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Thursday that it paid $24.5 million in restitution to consumers after uncovering illegal activities in auto finance and payment firms in the first four months of this year.

Flagstar Bancorp in Troy, Mich., is paying $371 million to put behind it the vestiges of its dealings with the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

First Bank in Hamilton, N.J., has raised $13.7 million by selling common stock.