PayThink

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp believes the financial industry "isn't just about numbers," and is concerned that the regulations coming out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act do not "take into consideration long-term relationship banking."

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is planning a major facelift to its exam procedures. These changes will be designed to make the exam process faster and free up enforcement personnel to pursue their own investigations outside of the regular exams.

Acquisitive banks have frequently used the "accretive to earnings" pabulum to sway shareholders and justify overpriced transactions. This has created an illusion of acquisition value that is detrimental to the market.

In an effort to ease servicers' concerns about communicating with struggling or bankrupt borrowers who invoke certain legal protections, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released clarifications to its mortgage servicing rules.

Consumers will have more confidence in the formal system of money transfers once they are given clear information about how much money will actually be available on the receiving end.

Monitoring fraud and deception is an immense undertaking for third-party payment processors and banks. Trying to make them into first responders to various social pathologies is a step too far.

These financially underserved individuals are far from disconnected. They are actually more active users of mobile phones and social media than the population at large.

Continued regulatory gaps in overdraft service put consumers at financial risk and potentially expose them to high, unexpected costs for little benefit.

It's the big events that get chronicled. A branch opening. A new headquarters. A merger.

My wife and I were blessed with six children. The youngest is a senior in high school and two are in college. We received an advertisement from Bluebird for prepaid debit cards for college students. That led to questions in my mind about my credit union's debit cards and prepaid cards.