Receiving Wide Coverage ... Now ex-employees take on Wells: Two former Wells Fargo managers are suing the bank, claiming they were unfairly scapegoated for raising issues about the bank’s sales practices. Reza and Marla Razzaghipour, who are husband and wife, oversaw regions in Southern California and managed a combined 3,500 employees. They were both fired last March. The lawsuit was filed August 31 in Los Angeles Superior Court.
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Wells said it “denies the allegations of these two former regional presidents. The termination decisions were not retaliatory as alleged in the complaint. The company terminated the employment of these two individuals for legitimate and lawful reasons.”
Wells Fargo can’t see the forest for the trees, according to New York Times financial columnist William D. Cohan. Rather than showing “how vigilant [it] can be in trying to avoid new rounds of criticism from regulators or members of Congress, a far better place for heightened vigilance would be a revamping of a compensation system that repeatedly rewards bad behavior by Wells Fargo’s bankers and its top executives,” he writes.
Wall Street Journal Rebounding: Issuance of commercial mortgage-backed securities has increased sharply in 2017. Banks and other underwriters are on track to issue more than $16 billion of securities this month, well above the $10.7 billion that was issued in June, the previous busiest month this year. Through the end of July, $47.4 billion of deals had come to market, up from $37.9 billion during the same period last year, according to Commercial Mortgage Alert. If that trend continues, this year’s volume will easily top 2016’s full-year volume of $77.6 billion.
Share, share, that's fair: Financial crime enforcement is being hindered by a lack of collaboration and data sharing among government agencies and financial institutions, according to speakers at the International Symposium on Economic Crime at Cambridge University on Monday. “Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of specialized units have been set up within government agencies to collect, analyze and investigate reports of suspicious financial dealings,” the paper reports. “But while financial institutions have an obligation to file such reports, privacy issues, poor technology and silo mentality prevent more efficient and fruitful intelligence sharing.”
Financial Times Cyberwarfare: China’s crackdown this week on initial coin offerings is the latest round of the “ultimate tug of war” between cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology behind them, the paper comments. “It pits powerful vested interests of the financial world against those who are seeking to use technology to challenge them. That debate and a continuing cat-and-mouse game between regulators and the financial markets has merged with a more general effort from Beijing to stamp out all kinds of financial risks.”
The robots are coming: Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan warns a “big number” of people at the bank will "ultimately" lose their jobs due to technology. “The truthful answer is we won’t need as many people,” he says. “In our banks we have people behaving like robots doing mechanical things, tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people.”
John Cryan, chief financial officer of UBS AG, speaks during a news conference in Zurich, Switzerland, on Tuesday, July 27, 2010. UBS AG, Switzerland's biggest bank, reported a third consecutive quarterly profit, beating analysts' estimates on higher-than-expected trading revenue. Photographer: Peter Frommenwiler/Bloomberg *** Local Caption *** John Cryan
Peter Frommenwiler/Bloomberg
Quotable “I am not comfortable that the American investing public understands the substantial risk that we face systemically from cyber issues and I would like to see better disclosure around that.” — Jay Clayton, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, speaking at New York University’s School of Law Tuesday.
The move comes about a year after rising delinquency levels prompted SBA to raise lender fees and tightened underwriting standards in its flagship 7(a) program.
Select ChatGPT users can now connect their bank accounts to the AI-powered chatbot for personal money management advice based on their financial history.
Suncoast Credit Union moved from one-time identity checks to monitoring members for the life of the account. It says fraud losses fell more than a third.
The $110 million settlement, which was mapped out last fall, requires Wells Fargo to establish a $100 million fund to provide downpayment and closing-cost assistance to eligible borrowers who live in or plan to buy a home in certain low- and moderate-income census tracts.
Whether red or blue, leaders share an affinity for battling fintech giants, as the liberal mayor is pressuring regulators to scuttle Western Union's plan to buy digital transfer Intermex, shortly following PayPal's 'DEI settlement' with the Trump administration.
Prashant Sharma, JPMorgan Payments' executive director of biometrics and identity solutions, spoke with American Banker about agentic commerce and how liability is shifting as a result of large language models.
