PayThink

Federal Reserve stress tests evaluate banks' ability to withstand severely adverse scenarios like the Great Recession. But the next downturn may pose different problems, according to Tony Hughes of Moody's Analytics.

You might think overhead expenses as a percentage of average assets decline as institutions get bigger. You'd be wrong.

Payment providers and licensed operators need to work together to educate consumers, banks and credit card companies in order to improve the overall experience and help reverse the slow adoption of online gaming in the U.S.

People who lack easy and affordable access to traditional bank accounts can benefit from cryptocurrency services that allow them save on remittance fees, pay bills on time and stay liquid.

Lenders are working to meet affordable housing needs by extending mortgages to borrowers with a broader range of credit scores and offering loans with lower down payments. But there's still more work to be done, according to Fannie Mae's Jeffery Hayward and Anne McCulloch.

Dodd-Frank encourages the pursuit of financial stability at the expense of economic growth. Congress can fix the problem by amending the law so that regulators are required to balance both goals, writes Paul H. Kupiec of the American Enterprise Institute.

Decisions about how to apply U.S. swaps trading rules abroad should be based less on fears of risk to the financial system and more on considerations of market integrity, according to attorney Timothy Karpoff.

Security breaches at trusted global corporations, such as Target and eBay are becoming a regular occurrence. Valuable customer data serves as a new currency of sorts for fraudsters, prompting the digital underground to stage well thought out attacks on a scale previously unheard of.

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

Six years ago, two players for the Central Washington University women's softball team carried an injured player of their opponent around the bases so that Western Oregon University's Sara Tucholsky could count her first collegiate home run.