Banking

Most millennials do almost all of their other business on a portable device, so they want to have this same functionality when buying a home.

Sunwest Bank in Irvine, Calif., has been sending employees to Africa and South America since 2011 to do philanthropic work. While such projects could help recruit Millennials, industry experts also see challenges selling foreign missions to employees and customers.

Sheila Bair, the former chairman of the FDIC, has the answer for significantly reducing the regulatory burden on small banks: give regulators the power to exempt institutions with less than $10 billion of assets from any new or existing regulation.

Home meal-prep delivery company PeachDish is working with Bitcoin processor BitPay to enable payments in the virtual currency.

Like a number of startups and "neobanks" that have sprouted up to challenge incumbent retail banks, Fidor Bank is positioning itself as a more consumer-friendly, tech-savvy alternative.

Student loan debt remains a pressing concern in the U.S. because of high balances and high rates of delinquencies and defaults. The issues have been discussed in recent blog posts by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Liberty Street Economics team.

The business analytics software firm SAS has formed a new division focused on risk research and quantitative solutions for financial services firms. It’s headed by former bank executive Troy Haines, according to an announcement Monday.

Responding to reports last week that its encryption keys had been stolen by U.S. and British spies five years ago, Gemalto contends its products are secure and announced it would reveal results of its investigation into the claims at a press conference Feb. 25 in Paris.

There's nothing wrong with big banks gaining market share because they offer the products and services that customers want. But there's a problem when big banks can beat off their smaller rivals with a club fashioned by legislators and regulators.

New Residential Investment Corp., a U.S. real estate investment trust, agreed to buy Home Loan Servicing Solutions Ltd. for about $1.3 billion.

One way to help the global economy prosper is to think of the poor and the middle class as untapped assets for entrepreneurship and job creation. That was the premise underlying a panel discussion at a recent conference on financial inclusion.The panel included, from left, Clare Woodcraft-Scott, the chief executive of the Emirates Foundation; Monica Mehta, managing principal of Seventh Capital in Houston, a family office that invests in lower-market consumer businesses, and author of "The Entrepreneurial Instinct: How Everyone Has the Innate Ability to Start a Successful Small Business," and Aja Brown, the mayor of Compton, Calif. Their discussion took place in Atlanta at the 2015 Hope Global Forum, presented by Operation Hope.

Aja Brown, the mayor of Compton, Calif., says introducing young people to what's possible, so that they don't feel limited by their current circumstances, is a way of continuing the mission that Martin Luther King Jr. started. Brown was a featured speaker at the recent Hope Global Forum, which focused on the theme of financial inclusion. She was there to discuss several initiatives underway in Compton, including one with the University of Southern California to offer industry-specific employment training.

Banks need outside help to deliver credit to the underserved, says Tim Wennes, the West Coast president of MUFG Union Bank, who shares advice on what kind of partners to seek and how to vet them.

The credit card delinquency rate remained steady in Q4 compared with a year earlier, while total outstanding credit card balance increased 5%. The increase indicates record growth, the highest yearly jump seen since 2008, according to a TransUnion report.

Rallying bank employees to participate in outreach projects takes hard work in the beginning, but their involvement is essential to building a rapport with the community, OneWest Bank CEO Joseph Otting says.

Bitcoin's premise is that an open-source computer protocol could support a new global currency, without reliance on the centralized power of banks and governments. But trusting a computer protocol, without human governance, doesn't make sense. As it stands, bitcoin's governance has a long ways to go before institutions would rely on this innovative but flawed currency as a store of value.

There are some fairly basic, decisive steps banks could take to educate people outside the financial mainstream, and it would make banking more profitable, says John Bryant, the chairman and CEO of the nonprofit Operation Hope.

Ocwen Financial has tentatively agreed to sell a mortgage-servicing portfolio on $9.8 billion of loans to Nationstar Mortgage Holdings, and Ocwen hinted that more deals may be in the offing.

HSBC Holdings Plc, struggling to contain a scandal over tax evasion at its private bank, posted lower-than-expected full-year profit as costs rose and investment banking earnings tumbled.

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc will write down the value of its U.S. unit, Citizens Financial Group, by about 4 billion pounds ($6.2 billion) next week, a person familiar with the matter said.