Receiving Wide Coverage ... Sad saga: Allan Dunlap, one of the 800,000 Wells Fargo auto loan customers charged for car insurance they didn’t need or ask for, tells the New York Times, “I never missed a payment and I always had insurance. But they forced additional coverage on my vehicle and it showed up on my credit report that I was 60 to 90 days late on my payments.” More than a year after starting his battle with the bank, he’s still waiting for confirmation that his credit report has been fixed.
Seperately, Wells Fargo’s new board chairman, former Federal Reserve Gov. Betsy Duke, is profiled by the Financial Times.
Wall Street Journal Settled: Bank of America agreed to pay more than $6 million to settle an eight-year-long dispute with a California couple who a federal judge said had been harassed and illegally foreclosed on by the bank’s mortgage unit. The proposed settlement with Erik and Renee Sundquist would enable the bank to avoid paying an earlier court-ordered $40 million donation to five California law schools and two consumer advocacy groups.
China deal: Massachusetts Mutual agreed to sell its Hong Kong-based unit for about $1.7 billion to a group of Asian investors, including two companies affiliated with Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, the chairman of Alibaba Group. One of those companies, Ant Financial, operates Alipay, the world's largest mobile and online payments platform.
MassMutual will get $1 billion in cash plus a 25% stake in Yunfeng Financial Group, a Hong Kong-listed financial services company the paper says “trades securities, sells investment products and is expanding into the growing financial technology sector.”
Tracing the crisis: In this video, the paper explains “how developments at an obscure French bank in August 2007 sowed the seeds” of the 2008 financial crisis.
Financial Times Road trip: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is suing six large European banks — Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland, Rabobank and UBS — plus the British Bankers’ Association, for their alleged role in rigging Libor. The FDIC said it brought the suit in a London court on behalf of 39 failed American banks that it claims suffered losses as a result.
That’s rich: Some investors are questioning the profitability of U.S. credit card issuers given the rich rewards they’ve been paying to stay competitive. Mercator Advisory Group expects their return on assets to shrink to 3.5% next year, down from almost 5% in 2014. “You can bring customers in, but at what cost? These rewards become very hard to justify. You have decreasing profitability with this arms race going on,” said Brian Riley, a Mercator director.
Quotable “Chase has become extremely political this year and I must be honest and say that others and myself have taken offense to much of it. [President Trump] condemned all hateful actors, as he should have. I have to see this conflict in my private life. I never thought I would deal with it at my workplace.” — An employee at JPMorgan Chase responding to CEO Jamie Dimon’s memo to bank employees Wednesday about Trump’s reaction to the events in Charlottesville, Va. The bank received more than 500 internal messages and email responses to Dimon’s memo, the vast majority of which supported their boss.
Institutions and their investors are facing pressure from climate activists, cautiously awaiting interest rate cuts and adjusting to new Federal Reserve and FDIC policies.
A new Citizens Bank survey suggests rising check-fraud incidents are driving middle-market companies to accelerate plans to fully adopt digital payments. But 70% of all businesses will continue to rely on checks for years to come, according to recent data from the Association for Financial Professionals.
After several quarters of slumping investment banking and trading fees, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company reported a big uptick from that division, which helped compensate for a large decline in net interest income.
The Federal Reserve's Office of the Inspector General says the Fed has yet to fulfill 65 recommendations, and also identified 18 outstanding issues at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The bank will use biometric authentication to streamline checkout in stores starting in 2025. It has already completed internal and external pilots of the technology.