PayThink

Experts have predicted the roll-out and wider adoption of Apple Pay, Amazon Payments, PayPal and even Bitcoin will be the driving forces that finally make actual wallets and plastic cards obsolete, replaced by mobile payments and digital transactions executed with ease from a smartphone or digital wallet.

Many community banks will soon have to replace outdated technology — expenses that will hit them in an ongoing environment of compressed net interest margins, increasing compliance costs and higher capital requirements.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

Total overhaul of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a long shot, but Congress can pass measures that set the housing agencies on a path to reform. Mandating deeper mortgage insurance coverage for loans sold to the housing agencies would be a good place to start.

With the introduction of Apple Pay, mobile wallet payment systems promise to disrupt long stagnant payment card status quo. But will these new services make our data and transactions safer?

Lenders could save time and money by offering homeowners the opportunity to finance the purchase of a rooftop solar system into a new mortgage.

While computers may have bested humans in chess and mutual fund management, loan underwriting is one area where men can still beat machines.

Organizations may be being misled about their security risk exposure, and are in serious danger of becoming victims of a security breach, which has become a major problem for merchants and payment companies.

EMV cards are moving payments security in the right direction. But if hackers tamper with the hardware or associated software on merchants' EMV-enabled equipment, they can silently spirit off customer data.

Small banks aren't disappearing-they're just getting bigger. Meanwhile, their large competitors are exiting business lines and selling off units. These changes suggest that regulators would be better off issuing rules based on lenders' level of complexity, relieving institutions that operate by a core banking model of unnecessary burdens.