Compliance

WASHINGTON – The government should encourage the development of the fintech sector, but should not grant a safe harbor for such firms, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Thursday.

Warren's voice is powerful in criticizing big banks, but she could play a more active role in providing relief to community banks to help boost job creation.

A $28.5 million fine won’t have much impact on the world’s largest credit union, but observers say that being disciplined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could be a bellwether for further enforcement actions from the embattled agency.

Without investigations by the Los Angeles Times and city prosecutors, the Wells Fargo account scandal would never have come to light. Where were federal regulators?

A federal appeals court ruling against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has raised questions about whether banks and other firms cited by the agency can protest previous enforcement actions. But doing so may create new risks for firms.

The No. 3 U.S. bank by assets has made a change at the top after a snowballing scandal involving the creation of fraudulent accounts.

Heightened regulatory scrutiny, stricter credit-quality reviews by buyers themselves, cautiousness over systems conversions and other factors have added about three weeks to deal closings in recent years. There are inherent risks in that trend and ways to minimize them.

A top Wells Fargo executive and a former employee painted very different pictures of the culture and oversight at the San Francisco bank during a hearing by a California Assembly committee on Tuesday that probed the opening of 2 million phony accounts.

WASHINGTON — Eighteen Republican State Attorneys General sent a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week pushing back against the agency's proposal to rein in high-cost small-dollar loans.

The ramifications for a U.S. Court of Appeals decision against the CFPB’s constitutionality go far beyond just the agency’s independence, and may have consequences for other federal agencies with similar structures. The ruling may also hamper the CFPB’s powers going forward, including its ability to retroactively apply new rules.

WASHINGTON — Navy Federal Credit Union, the largest credit union in the country, agreed Tuesday to pay $28.5 million to settle regulatory allegations it engaged in illegal debt collection practices.

Fintech circles are abuzz about the possibilities for streamlining compliance work following IBM's deal to buy Promontory. Artificial intelligence software could help separate false positives from true violations, for example, or read and parse through lengthy regulations.

The single-director structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau represents an unconstitutional concentration of executive power, a federal appeals court said Tuesday. But the court stopped short of disbanding the agency, instead giving the president more power to remove its leader.

ATM operators have been down this road before, dealing with Mastercard's rules on EMV transactions occurring with the international Maestro debit cards as far back as 2013. But awareness and experience doesn't automatically translate to preparation.

The credit union division at the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR) received certification of accreditation from the National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors (NASCUS).

Credit unions and banks already scrambling to comply with a number of different federal cybersecurity standards are raising concerns about a proposal from New York to layer on some additional state rules.

The regulations added in the wake of the financial crisis have made the system safer, but it's time to pause on new rules and find ways to improve what's been put in place already, according to the top executives at some of the largest banks.

Thomas Depping, who quit banking out of frustration with regulators five years ago, says Warburg Pincus' deep pockets will help him make Ascentium Capital a household name among small-business borrowers.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on the financial services panel introduced legislation Wednesday that would help banks remotely open accounts.

For many restaurants that originally put EMV on the back burner because of technical complexities and a lower general risk of counterfeit card fraud, waiting to support chip cards has proven to be the right decision.