PayThink

The scene: A television studio in Culver City, Calif.

New technology from Apple and others can help banks create appointments, share offers, crowdsource customer service and identify their best customers, all in real time.

Understanding consumer credit card spending habits has been difficult historically.

Money market funds possess trillions of dollars of short-term institutional investor funds. Now the SEC’s proposed rule change for the industry may give banks an opportunity to attract institutional depositors with cash management offerings.

Community banks exist to serve their customers and communities, not efficiency ratio-obsessed market observers.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has signaled that more changes for the leverage ratio, risk weights, and Pillar III will (eventually) be implemented. But it has yet to address operational risk and data collection issues.

While it is undoubtedly possible to create standalone institutions that can weather almost any financial storm, the capital and liquidity levels of those institutions will seriously limit their usefulness as engines of economic growth.

For most of the banking industry, the ability to generate real-time views and assessments of risk across a company – right down to the transaction level – remains dangerously elusive.

Chairman Mary Jo White may have promised more enforcement actions, but a pursuit of minor infractions could increase the likelihood that the SEC, already operating on a tight budget, will miss major ones.

In an increasingly commoditized industry, our people can be one of the few true differentiators left. But the model that has them forever sitting in buildings that fewer and fewer people utilize makes less strategic sense each year.