PayThink

Community banks have long been reliant on — and constrained by — a handful of core-banking technology vendors. But enterprise artificial intelligence licenses offer the chance to transcend those limitations.

Rather than replacing bankers, artificial intelligence is likely to amplify their impact: strengths as well as weaknesses. This makes investing in employee development more important than ever.

The policies most community banks rely on for cyber liability, fidelity bonds and directors and officers insurance are full of overlapping exclusions, restrictive coverage sublimits and vague specifications. That can become an expensive problem.

A primary criticism of stablecoins harks back to the era of free banking, when individual banks printed their own notes. But that era of private money bears little resemblance to the modern realities of stablecoin issuance.

As governors prepare to designate new "opportunity zones," lenders and investors should take advantage of the chance to target capital to communities where it will both do good and generate strong returns.

Banks can price in risk and manage their way around both left-wing and right-wing administrations. But the kind of uncertainty that arises from today's brand of politics is impossible to model.

As the regulatory landscape for digital assets becomes clearer, it is vital that stablecoin reserves, custody and settlement services, and the provision of liquidity not be concentrated within a small number of companies.

Efforts by individual states to rewrite existing rules governing interstate bank lending risk throwing the entire system into chaos. Only Congress has the ability to reestablish a workable set of national rules.

The new law's reciprocal and custodial deposit provisions recognize what the evidence has shown for two decades. They should spur, not substitute for, the broader work of protecting America's depositors.

The recently announced consortium of crypto companies behind OpenUSD, a new dollar-denominated stablecoin, will have to demonstrate that it can build partnerships with banks and intermediaries before it can challenge USDC and Tether.