Law and regulation

The Federal Housing Finance Agency provided an update Tuesday to its pilot program designed to turn foreclosed properties into rental homes, saying it had announced the first round of winning bidders.

Solera National Bank in Lakewood, Colo., has been freed from a consent order under which it had been operating for more than two years.

For some bankers, doing well by doing bad has become a way of life. If ever there was a time to raise the cost of wrongdoing, Liborgate is it.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners will hold a hearing on possible abuses in August. Yet a key regulator doubts the industry is seriously troubled.

Lending to American consumers, businesses and other entities is, as best practiced, far from a simple business. Going beyond this to dabble in opaque markets will inevitably degrade the competence with which banks' basic business is conducted.

Though banks must show they are resolvable, a financial institution can also use its resolution plan to advocate preferred solutions to issues on the horizon. And other lessons from the process so far.

Bankers are concerned about how sharing information with the Consumer Financial Protection Agency will affect client confidentiality. "Typically, information given to a third party loses attorney-client privilege, and prior legislation formally exempted the other bank regulators from that rule," writes American Banker's Joe Adler. "But Dodd-Frank did not expressly include the CFPB in that exemption.”

California lawmakers on Monday passed a package of foreclosure prevention bills that will slow foreclosures, impose stricter rules on mortgage servicers and potentially raise the cost of home loans.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter Monday to CFPB Director Richard Cordray urging him to take several steps, including defining what "abusive" products and practices are.

Nearly all smartphone users in Sweden will soon have access to a mobile payment service called MyWallet if their phones support it.

We won't have another nationwide bubble for 35 years or so. By then, cautionary tales from 2007-09 will seem irrelevant to those with modern skills and advanced risk management capability.

Two years into Dodd-Frank implementation, how is compliance going from an information technology perspective? Banks still have plenty of IT challenges to work through, agree consultants in a collection of mini-essays presented by Bank Systems & Technology. Curiously the lone voice of optimism the mix comes from a bank CEO.

FDIC loss-sharing deals are significantly down this year as failures get smaller, bidders become more competitive and the economic situation improves.

Navy Federal Credit Union in Vienna, Va., has established a commercial loan participation program in which it will buy business loans from other credit unions that are nearing their cap on business lending.

The U.K.'s Financial Services Authority has "a number of investigations concerning Libor" beyond the case that resulted in a record fine levied against Barclays Plc last week, the agency's acting head of enforcement said.

You've probably heard of the Office of Financial Research's database for tracking financial companies like barcodes. It's also tasked with building another system that's equally critical – and a much greater technical challenge.

In Washington last week, all eyes were on the Supreme Court's healthcare ruling. But there were other important issues happening in the national Capitol, including the pending release of living wills, a different ruling from the high court, and a surprising new report on the Federal Home Loan Banks.

QCR Holdings (QCRH) in Moline, Ill., has repaid about a fourth of its money it received from the Treasury Department's Small Business Lending Fund Program as part of its effort to increase its tangible common equity.

Payday and advance deposit loans have been getting a lot of regulatory attention recently.

WASHINGTON — As the federal government begins to take a closer look at the regulation of mobile payments, the first signs of a split within the payments industry are emerging.