PayThink

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including recommended reforms to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Ripple Labs' efforts to work toward a decentralized payments protocol.

Just remember: it's nothing more than tech-enabled small talk after all.

Far too many commercial and corporate banks are missing out on a chance to improve profits by scrutinizing their pricing practices and performance.

Financial institutions worldwide are exploring the possibilities for faster, cheaper, more transparent processing of global payments in near real time offered by distributed software solutions, including blockchains and distributed ledgers. Because this is a new field of study, these technologies are often misunderstood or mischaracterized.

Ruth Porat wows investors in her first earnings call as Google's CFO while Marianne Lake moves a step closer to running JPMorgan's future calls. Elsewhere, Lynn Tilton bids to move her fraud trial to federal court, Janet Yellen hints at support for raising the SIFI bar and Obama gets ready to nominate another woman for Fed governor.

Regulators and lawmakers are wrong to focus on bank size as a measure of risk. A far better indicator of bank stability is the riskiness of a bank's assets, as well as which of the bank's sources of funding bear that risk.

A credit union's mobile banking program can provide a wealth of intelligence in the form of member data to be analyzed.

Connecting disparate payment platforms is the Holy Grail of cryptocurrencies. The path to building such a system is not always clear, but must start at the core of the protocol.

A new business may only operate in one market now, but with growth opportunities in markets around the world, it makes sense to think long-term when selecting a Payment Service Provider (PSP).

Nobody enjoys the experience of making a payment — so a growing number of companies are likely to follow Uber's lead and make transactions so easy they're practically invisible. That means banks will have to ramp up their efforts to become customers' default cards.