PayThink

The traditional bank model for small business lending is broken. As a result, technology-enabled alternatives have gained momentum over the past couple years to provide small business owners with loan options that better suit their needs.

The ruling means that customers could be at risk for not reviewing bank statements carefully and then failing to notify their bank of an error in a timely manner.

Three major credit agencies are overhauling the way they resolve disputes and report unpaid medical debt. That’s a good start, but the best way to wipe out credit-reporting errors is to encourage Americans to review them regularly.

The mash-up of existing technologies into new solutions (i.e. innovation) is something we are seeing a lot in the financial sector, particularly within the payments ecosystem.

An employee's careless tweet or Facebook status update can pose big risks to financial firms, but social media is still a necessary tool for engaging with younger customers.

Banks will only be able to compete with nimble digital startups if they invest in a diverse portfolio of fintech initiatives and avoid foisting traditional, buttoned-down cultures onto fledgling partners.

Recent high profile acquisitions made by some of the payment industry’s key players, such as Heartland Payment Systems, First Data, and Vantiv, point to a recurring theme—traditional merchant businesses are making the shift into integrated technologies.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the best way to instill ethical culture and what the U.S. can learn from foreign countries' efforts to reach the unbanked.

Not only should regulators investigate the timing of OneWest's charitable donations to supporters of its proposed merger with CIT Group, they should encourage both banks to adopt clear CRA benchmarks that would hold them accountable for future investments in local communities.

The CFPB wants to expand banks' data reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. But this would impose even greater costs upon local financial institutions that are already overburdened by regulation.