PayThink

Great news: Women snagged a handful of C-level titles at big companies this week, including Ellen Alemany, Kim Hammonds and Heather Cox, and Square stands out in Silicon Valley with a leadership team that's 60% women. Bad news: the gender pay gap is growing and there are only two women among Harvard's picks for the top 100 CEOs globally. Also in the news: Blackrock's Cheryl Mills, B of A's Cathy Bessant and ICICI's Chanda Kochhar.

Industry representatives are howling about the lack of consumer benefit from the Durbin amendment, but we still know very little about the impact of the debit fee cap.

The industry will undoubtedly get bad press in an election cycle, but here is what institutions should do and not do about it.

Independent sales organizations and sales agents are finding that offering merchant cash advances and small-business loans can provide a lucrative sideline. But as with any enterprise, entrepreneurs who are focusing on the upside of the business should also develop a keen understanding of the pitfalls that can accompany a foray into alternative finance.

So many banks are running systems that were implemented before 1984, the year Mark Zuckerberg was born. They’re going to be dead meat in the age of real-time connectivity in the near-free world of today’s mobile Internet.

Regulatory action is needed to weed out patently unfair fee structures, but as an industry we should and can do better on our own.

October 1 marked the dawn of a new era in the U.S. payment card marketplace. While there are not yet rules from the card brands that demand all parties utilize EMV technology, the financial liability shift is a significant first step across a line in the sand that cannot be erased.

While migration to cards with chip technology should help mitigate card fraud, additional steps by retailers and more layers of security are needed.

Presidential candidates shouldn’t rely on crowd-pleasing gimmicks or trick plays to reform the banking system, but the execution of the basics. This means focusing on the time-tested risk-return tradeoff and restructuring our existing deposit insurance system to be truly risk based.

From interest rate risk to C-suite and boardroom diversity to succession planning, community bankers need to be acutely tuned in to a combination of global and domestic factors that are changing their world at an unprecedented pace.