Law and regulation

Bank of America completed a $2.1 billion bulk sale of nonperforming home loans in the second quarter, and is almost done with such dispositions, said Chief Financial Officer Bruce Thompson.

Even activities permitted under the Volcker Rule may not be worth the legal and compliance costs for small and midsize banks, according to three attorneys at Bass, Berry & Sims.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew urged Congress and financial companies to step up their fight against cyber threats, saying malicious acts pose a risk to national security and financial stability.

Mian, a money services business in Georgia, has agreed to pay the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network a $45,000 penalty for repeatedly violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

Smaller banks are disproportionately affected by regulation, forcing some to consider selling or to rethink their strategy, two community bankers argued before Congress.

Although the landmark bill bearing his name stopped short of consolidating the regulators, former Sen. Christopher Dodd said creating a single prudential agency could be revived one day.

WASHINGTON — A new analysis by the American Action Forum examines the cumulative costs and paperwork burdens of the Dodd-Frank Act roughly four years after the financial reform law's passage.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. proposed several assessment-pricing changes to correspond with the Basel III regime, including altering how highly complex banks report counterparty risk.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday, partisan lawmakers gave wildly divergent interpretations of the payment system crackdown.

The Fed Chair tells lawmakers she's "very positive on the idea of having a community banker appointed to the Board," but against requiring it by legislation.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has proposed tailoring its system for pricing banks' insurance premiums to correspond with new Basel capital requirements.

"The real question for me is should we be in the FHA business at all," the CEO says.

The FDIC, OCC and Federal Reserve all plan to testify Tuesday that banks, not their regulators, are ultimately responsible for deciding who is an appropriate customer.

Federal and state authorities on Monday sought to rein in three companies accused of exploiting consumers struggling to pay off their debts.

The Justice Department's $7 billion deal with Citigroup is likely not the last big government maneuver to penalize banks for faulty mortgage-related practices leading to the financial crisis.

For months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau floated a contract giving it control over the content of bank customers' complaints submitted online to the agency. It scrapped the plan after industry objections.

The alternative payments provider Dwolla insists that regulating Internet traffic will hurt startups, and it is among a group of companies that will argue this point before the Federal Communications Commission on July 15.

A recent report from the Center for Responsible Lending finds that debt settlement companies frequently fail to settle the bulk of their clients’ debts, leaving them in even weaker financial positions.

Two men who said they ran a payday loan brokerage in Tampa, Fla., have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from consumers' bank accounts.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says brokers will have to comply with compensation limits even if they are funding loans via a warehouse line of credit.