Law and regulation

Lucrative sale of a subprime lending unit. Big credit card deal. Clear business plan. It's looking like a good year for Citi — provided it passes the CCAR stress test this week and fills a key executive post.

Seeking a uniform process for card-not-present transactions in the Single Euro Payments Area throughout Europe, the European Payments Council has created a blueprint for an interoperable card and terminal infrastructure.

The Subsidy Reserve Act would bring into the open the financial benefits of being "too big to fail" — benefits the big banks claim to be nonexistent.

The European Parliament on March 9 voted in favor of capping interchange fees for domestic and cross-border transactions, a move that many European banks anticipated.

Tiered regulation could bring about a number of useful changes for regional banks, including a more customized approach to determining capital adequacy and simplified resolution planning requirements.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's second arbitration study indicates the bureau's intent to regulate financial institutions' inclusion of clauses that prevent customers from suing.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Monday said that, should he run for president in 2016, his progressive platform would include breaking up the largest Wall Street banks.

The Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase were far apart last week in how much revenue the company would be making after the kind of economic shock envisioned in the Dodd-Frank stress test. The gap has JPM observers cautiously awaiting the results of this week's CCAR test.

New York's Amalgamated Bank is hoping to do more business with political action committee and left-leaning customers as its retail business shrinks.

When regulators use asset size as a yardstick, they impose unnecessary rules on larger financial institutions that employ traditional banking models.

Banks have spent a lot of money in order to comply with stress-test requirements. But they will only realize the value on their investments if they integrate stress-test tools and results into their daily decision-making process.

Two activist groups are urging the Fed and OCC to investigate whether OneWest used donations and other sweeteners to buy community support for its sale to CIT.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the downside of public banking and the vulnerabilities unaddressed by global regulators' bail-in plan for megabanks.

Observers fear state regulator Benjamin Lawsky's proposal to model anti-laundering reviews after Sarbanes-Oxley requirements could thin ranks of compliance specialists and slow monitoring.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, under fire from critics in the aftermath of the credit crisis for its weight in the U.S. central bank system, got a vote of support from the head of its largest counterpart.

Much of the Fed's decidedly more hawkish view on bank regulation stems from Gov. Daniel Tarullo, and some reform advocates fear that it could become less intense when he departs.

Four years after agreeing to an initial settlement, Bank of America has won court approval for its $8.5 billion settlement with investors over Countrywide's mortgage practices. Here's an update on all the other big mortgage litigation outstanding.

Community and regional banks should be subjected to simpler rules than very large banks, the chairman and CEO of the Buffalo, N.Y., company said. In fact, size is the wrong determinant for risk-based regulation, he said.

All 31 firms that took this year's Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test had enough capital to withstand the Fed's hypothetical severe economic scenario, but several of the largest banks were teetering on the edge of the leverage and risk-based capital requirements.

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