Data Sets

A selection of images featuring credit unions' efforts in their communities.

Bitcoin is gaining legitimacy as an alternative to cash and card payments, but for all its popularity, the digital currency has many limitations. Here are a few.

American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. As excerpted from the Comments sections of AmericanBanker.com articles.

Fearless forecasts from BankThink's stable of industry veterans, experts and critics.

Here's who has the potential to shake up the debates over housing finance reform, "too big to fail," consumer regulation and other key banking issues in the new year.

A year ago we asked BankThink contributors to make bold predictions about 2012. Here's a look back at their forecasts and the actual outcomes.

The second half of December is generally a slow period for news, with many people on vacation and businesses and government closed on holidays. Still, banks made a number of significant announcements this holiday season. In many cases the timing of disclosures may have been driven by circumstance - regulators appeared eager to wrap up settlements by yearend.

A selection of images featuring credit unions' efforts in their communities.

Cloud-based wallets, QR code wallets and other software-based wallets seem to be shoving Near Field Communication hardware out of the spotlight. But reports of the death of NFC, which enables contactless payments from many mobile devices, have been greatly exaggerated.

A number of CEOs departed this year - voluntarily or otherwise. Some, like William Aichele of Univest, had been with their institutions for decades. Others, including Michael Tierney, had much shorter tenures.

December was one of the most active months for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as it took several enforcement actions spanning from mortgage servicing to indirect auto lending. A number of cases were key milestones for the agency as it partnered with federal and state authorities as well as employed some controversial legal theories such as disparate impact. Here’s a countdown of the big cases for the month.

A compilation of the year's favorite stories, as selected by the people who assigned and edited them. Picks exclude items that appear among Top Stories of 2013, as measured by audience size.

The payments industry is full of big ideas that haven't always found the right audience. As we enter 2014, a few trends are bringing new relevance to some older technologies.

We revisit some of the best comments readers posted to AmericanBanker.com and BankThink.com in 2013.

Deals involving large community and midsize banks dominated M&A in 2013. The motives and market conditions involved differed dramatically, but all the dealmakers had -- and in some cases still have -- tough questions to answer from regulators, investors and activists.

BankThink editors Marc Hochstein and Jeanine Skowronski recap 10 of the blog's posts they found most memorable in 2013.

Underperformance was a matter of perspective this year. A strong stock market provided a lift to all banks with more than $20 billion in assets, though these institutions underperformed relative to the 30% rise in the KBW Bank Stock Index.

The KBW Bank Index continued its upward trajectory in 2013, again outperforming the S&P 500 (all returns are through Dec. 12). This year, many of the top performing bank stocks among those with $20 billion or more in assets were large community banks rather than the biggest institutions.

A selection of images featuring credit unions' efforts in their communities.

Square, Google, PayPal and many other mobile payment providers overhauled their technology in 2013. Here's a look at how things changed, on the surface and underneath.