PayThink

The mortgage insurance industry has paid about $30 billion in claims, mostly to Fannie and Freddie, through the current cycle. That $30 billion is money that didn't have to come from the taxpayer.

The National Fair Housing Alliance's past discrimination initiatives against the property insurance industry and others suggest that servicers should expect a series of press releases and HUD complaints followed by federal court actions.

Why has there been continuing explosive growth in prepaid cards, primarily marketed by nonbanks and most profitably to people who are already bank customers?

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."