Commercial banking

President Trump and his administration have begun to scrap new mortgage lending guidelines that made it easier for home buyers and sellers to dispute property appraisals, finding that homes owned by racial minorities are routinely valued lower than comparable homes with white owners. But despite the promised regulatory relief, many mortgage lenders say the regulatory changes will not impact their lending practices.

Aleisha Donald is a partner consultant at Xero.

Jay Brogdon, currently president of the Arkansas bank, will take the helm at the beginning of next year.

Emma Bienias is managing director of Stout, a global advisory firm specializing in corporate finance, accounting and transaction advisory, valuation, financial disputes, claims, and investigations.  She has a background in performing valuation engagements for various purposes including financial reporting, tax valuations, business reorganizations, pre-acquisition diligence, post-acquisition disputes, fairness and solvency opinions and other management planning and corporate-related matters. Emma has experience providing expert litigation support for analyses of economic damages resulting from the infringement or misappropriation of intellectual property rights. She has performed damage analyses that included consideration of unjust enrichment, loss profits, and reasonable royalty. Emma also combines financial, market and competitive information to value intellectual property for a variety of objectives such as regulatory compliance, licensing and sale transactions, and securing financing for corporate acquisitions and expansion.

The bank is working through a list of legal issues it inherited when it bought Credit Suisse in early 2023.

The bank is hiring Aashish Dhakad from Ares Management Corp. to become head of private credit origination for North America.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office last week criticizing a probe into the bureau's funding request for 2025, insisting that acting CFPB Director Russell Vought has "sole discretion'' to determine funding and staffing levels.

Alessio Alionço is the founder and CEO of Pipefy, a leading process management and AI platform. Brazilian-born Alionco is a high-impact global leader and has grown Pipefy from its founding in 2015 to a company with hundreds of customers worldwide. Pipefy delivers a business process automation platform that improves productivity and efficiency, centralizes data, and standardizes processes for teams in insurance.

Rather than deleting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now is the time for the president and Congress to reform and reboot it into the agency that carries out its mission in an apolitical manner.

The President's Work Group on Digital Assets released a report calling for changes to the central bank's master account policies. The reforms could make it easier for digital asset groups to access the federal payments system.