PayThink

One of my mantras over the past few years has been that as our industry becomes more technology-driven and our products and services more commoditized, our people become more important, not less.

It all seemed so simple. The cause of the financial crisis was that private label securitizers of subprime mortgage loans weren't required to "have enough skin in the game," so Dodd-Frank would require them to retain 5% of the risk.

The "hacktivist" group Anonymous has been a bane for many financial companies, but a boon for one company's financials. Its choice of a Guy Fawkes mask as its logo has been profitable for Time Warner, which owns the rights to the image.

Remember that fuss about the dire danger of having an unknowable but evidently substantial number of banks that are Too Big to Fail? The message was: "Stop that!"

In the Washington Post last week, housing columnist Kenneth Harney took an interesting look at mortgage loans guaranteed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A prepaid card breach disclosed in May was accomplished by hackers who turned off the withdrawal limits on multiple card accounts, according to a new report.

Twenty years ago I engineered the sale of Security Pacific Bank, at the time the nation's fifth largest bank, to Bank of America. On August 12, 1991, the day the deal was announced BofA's stock closed at $10.00. Today it closed at $7.65 a decline of 23% over the past two decades.

The FDIC and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will soon finalize one of the more significant requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act — the mandate for large banking organizations and systemically important nonbank financial institutions to prepare resolution plans, more commonly known as "living wills."

Global custodians have spent decades using bundled fees to mask egregious conflicts of interest and overcharge pension funds, and by extension the taxpayers and public servants who underwrite them.

When Hewlett-Packard discontinued its TouchPad tablet, it sold its remaining inventory at a price that was too good to be true. Pranksters, and possibly fraudsters, caught on quick.