PayThink

Google Wallet has undergone several major revisions since it launched and while the issues solved with its latest iteration were among its biggest hurdles, it's still too soon to declare a winner in the mobile wallet race.

There’s a reason most Americans still like their local banks, even if they detest the megabanks after the financial crisis.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. all announced plans to hold public board meetings on Dec. 10 to vote on a final Volcker Rule.

In the end, we will once again have a system that looks suspiciously like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac redux, with a housing bubble, a mortgage meltdown and a financial crisis.

Most systemically important financial institutions are publicly traded, so they’d have to immediately disclose any orders from the Fed to curb systemic risk. Their securities would get hammered. Thus, Fed supervision is a strong incentive to operate safely.

A Volcker Rule limiting investment in securities used primarily for customer transactions to 10% of the firm’s revenue is simple for banks to understand and easy for regulators to enforce.

Passing framework rules without considering technology implementation has proven disastrous for the CFTC. Like the Obamacare website debacle, it has brought to the fore unresolved Big Data issues.

It's been nearly two years since the FDIC first unveiled its so-called “single point of entry” approach, which is designed to help unwind a systemically important financial institution. Yet without more details, the strategy is in danger of imploding.

Bank M&A activity has been lackluster in most parts of the country. It will probably stay that way, since so many banks are too small for buyers to bother with.

In a Nov 13, a piece on CUJournal.com, entitled "Credit Unions Beat Banks In Loan Growth, Exec Pay And More," cited a study from Enetrix that claims that the median base salary of credit union CEOs is higher than the salary of bank CEOs of comparable size - this is very misleading.