PayThink

The dramatic exit of Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the International Monetary Fund and the selection of Christine Lagarde as the fund's new managing director have put the international spotlight on the process by which leadership of international financial bodies is determined.

There are few topics as easy to get into a friendly, if a bit heated, debate these days as "the future of branches" in banking. Many folks quickly compare branches to buggy whip factories and traditional bankers to Luddites. Others jump in and cite research or survey results that say customers still prefer to open accounts in branches, and that, by the way, branches are still profitable.

In a flat-fee model, most of the innovative energy goes into reducing costs rather than developing services that customers value.

There is new evidence against a suspected spokesman for the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec: Police say they found 750,000 passwords on his computer.

The proposed Qualified Residential Mortgage rules have a better chance at harming the housing market than they have at addressing underlying weaknesses in the securitization process. They are an overreaction to the excessive risk-taking during the housing boom.

Police attribute a rash of ATM crime to what they call the "Poison Ivy Fraud Ring."

It isn't very often you meet someone whose name is currently on a list of people the Taliban is seeking to kill. And yet one such person shared the story of his work and that of credit unions in Afghanistan.

Many CUs are asking a lot of "what-if" questions. While NCUA cannot answer these questions, as each CU's needs are its own, it can propose a few high-level questions to help decide whether the grass could be greener on the other side.

[The proposed QRM rule] is a horrible requirement for the home mortgage business. We certainly do not need to go back to poor lending habits, but we do need to have in place programs that allow people who CAN purchase a home do it.

I recently read how two CEOs tamed the IT beast in the June 26 issue of Credit Union Journal. Working for the largest credit union in Hawaii, I have been quite surprised by the lack of mature IT approaches in credit unions.