PayThink

Look ma, no hands (or mag stripe): Sporting eyewear with a built-in camera, a cashier or flea market vendor could accept a payment card simply by looking at it.

Goldman Sachs Group [GS] is raising money for a new fund that will buy home-loan bonds and, it hopes, benefit from an improving real-estate market, according to Bloomberg. My initial reaction is: this is insane.

Editor's Note, July 25, 2012: This and other BankThink opinion columns written by Joel Sucher bearing this note, published between October 2011 and June 2012, mentioned the law firm of Stephen J. Baum, Litton Loan Servicing, or both. The columns should have disclosed that Baum's firm, working on behalf of Litton, had attempted to foreclose on the writer's property in 2009. American Banker's editors were unaware of this history at the time the columns were published.

A most significant global institution, the G20, made up of the sovereign heads of the 23 largest global economies, late last year formally accepted the responsibility of creating a global identification system for financial market participants and the financial products they trade in.

To increase the odds of a successful execution many organizations create "strategy centered scorecards" to measure the journey toward their established vision and objectives.

Why shouldn't the public know the CAMEL rating and associated problems in a credit union when the CEO is under consideration for an NCUA Board post? The public has a right to know.

The former PSCU Financial Services in St. Petersburg, Fla., is now just PSCU. It's new tagline and brand are a simple word: "Forward". CEO Mike Kelly says the company is living that word through the "relentless pursuit of better ways."

The Durbin amendment did not so much make the economics of low value payments unsustainable as reveal the fundamental truth that they were unsustainable to begin with.

Nancy and Ray are day-trippers, but their usual destination is not a historical or cultural attraction. Instead, they scour the highways and byways looking for ATMs lacking proper fee-notice signs. When they find one, they make a cash withdrawal, take a picture, and file a class-action lawsuit. And they are not alone.

Re: "Bank of America Sold Card Debts to Collectors Despite Faulty Records"