Capital markets

The company, founded by musician Jack Conte about five years ago, allows fans to give creators a steady paycheck to create new content, and it's a clear hit among certain communities. But by severing the clear link between product and payment, it has also created some unprecedented issues.

Under Liz Myers, J.P. Morgan's equity capital markets group has led the industry in such key metrics as number of deals and fees generated for eight years running.

Across asset management, investment banking, capital markets and cards, these finance executives stand out for their performance and for helping to create a path to parity for women in sectors that tend to be even more male-dominated than the banking industry.

LendingPoint, which caters to borrowers with damaged credit records, believes that traditional credit scores are overly pessimistic about the likelihood that certain borrowers will repay.

Flush with cash, many commercial firms are also opting to pay down debt rather than take on new loans, and those seeking financing aren’t always turning to banks to meet their needs.

Fed economists are suggesting a new mortgage product that would allow home buyers to build equity faster and give banks incentive to profitably hold the loans in portfolio.

New European standards require greater data sharing to accommodate faster transaction processing, mobile payments and other digital efforts — a trend that is also inspiring new collaborations across the pond.

The commercial potential of internet-connected devices appears bound only by imagination and comfort. For security companies, there's a similar broad horizon as watches, refrigerators and other everyday items become tools for payments.

Having a leverage ratio as a backstop to risk-based capital requirements is sound, but the way it is currently calibrated is having a dramatic effect on financial markets.

Security companies are using technology to stop more complex fraud based on a smaller amount of data, and investors are taking notice.

Young businesses often prefer banks, especially community banks, over online lenders. However, traditional lenders need to make quicker decisions, simplify the application process and make other improvements, these customers say.

Fifth Third’s new chief legal counsel, Jelena McWilliams, might be changing jobs again and Australia’s first female bank CEO tells all in a memoir. Plus, the advantage with female founders, and young feminists on the rise.

San Francisco-based startup UnifyID is developing an “implicit authentication” platform that requires no conscious actions by users to authenticate identities, and it’s just closed $20 million in fresh funding to support its growth.

Christine Duhaime, an anti-money-laundering attorney in Toronto, lays out the reasons banks should become early experts (and assist) in initial coin offerings. She also lays out the risks, especially in the wake of the SEC’s report suggesting some ICO tokens are really securities.

The agency’s new classification of “initial coin offerings” is yet another affront to the efforts by fledgling companies to raise funds.

Visa's recent leading of a $25 million investment round in Marqeta is an unusual move for the card network, which has most recently focused its investments in merchant acquiring technology companies.

Startups and open-source software projects have raised $1.3 billion this year through initial coin offerings. The real boom may still lie ahead, fears of a bubble notwithstanding.

CircleUp is offering lines of credit to early-stage consumer brands, which can often only get financing at high interest rates.

The federal agency's investigative report concludes that crowdsales of blockchain tokens known as initial coin offerings may need to comply with securities laws.

Just as pre-crisis success was illusory, so too might be expectations that banks could ever regain that type of profit growth again.