PayThink

A card-skimming device is only convincing if it stays stuck to the ATM.

Shouldn't it be a given that an agency staffed with green examiners and tasked with enforcing new rules will communicate with banks before slapping them with regulatory orders?

A health-care organization that was in the process of encrypting its data let one computer get away – and put the personal data of 3.3 million patients at risk.

The federal government could avoid many unnecessary bank failures by making targeted preferred equity investments in community banks with a Camels 3 rating.

Why go on a shopping spree when you can go on a "skimming spree"?

The Treasury and the banking industry would like nothing better than to see more credit unions convert to taxpaying banks. This is hardly going to happen if CUs perceive the OCC as an inhospitable regulator of their mutual form.

Risk management expert Clifford Rossi looks at two recently released documents on the FHA, which he says together "bear ominous warnings about a portfolio in excess of $1 trillion."

Canada is replacing its paper $100 bills with plastic ones to deter counterfeiting.

This is the time of year when bank boards of directors and management begin the strategic planning process for the following year. There will be few years in the careers of any of us that will provide as many seemingly one-time events as will this coming year, 2012.

It might not be well-reasoned; it might not always be civil; and it might not be fair. But the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its anti-finance bias, is with us and it is real. And unless the economy improves, or some other dramatic event occurs that at the moment seems remote, the reality is that banks are stuck for now in a reputational backwater.