Technology

Fintech companies with narrow-purpose banking charters pose a safety-and-soundness risk and should be denied access to the payment system and other perks unless they meet the same strict regulatory criteria as traditional financial institutions, trade groups for banks and credit unions told the Federal Reserve.

The fintech, which arranges point-of-sale loans in partnership with merchants, was fined $2.5 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and ordered to refund up to $9 million to consumers who received loans they never applied for.

Novus, a startup whose app helps consumers make environmentally conscious purchases, is using application programming interfaces provided by the two companies to expand quickly. The effort shows how open banking can extend the reach of small companies and create new business lines for larger ones.

The bank is piloting fingerprint-reading cards that work with existing payment terminals. Its goals are to strengthen security for large transactions and to inform future deployments in other markets.

ICBA Bancard will help link community banks to instant payments through a partnership with real-time services hub provider Finzly.

The card issuer, which is offering its customers a chance to purchase non-fungible tokens created from a recent performance by the singer SZA, is betting that the digital art-trading phenomenon will become more mainstream.

Cullen/Frost Bankers will allow customers to access deposits two days early as traditional lenders look to drum up business by mimicking their financial-technology rivals.

The national debit network Interac is working with Payments Canada, which oversees the country's payment system, on an instant payment rail while demand from local shoppers and a need for faster supply chain finance grow more pronounced.

Banks and businesses want a connected system that "just works," regardless of which rail the senders and recipients use. But there is no consensus on how to make that happen.

Morgan Stanley on Thursday disclosed that a data breach at one of its contractors led to the theft of personal information about some customers whose stock accounts had gone dormant.