Compliance

A chief financial officer's workday is booked solid dealing with regulatory issues, risk assessments and finding places to cut costs. If they could find an extra hour, bank CFOs say they would use that time to consider how to improve their banks' strategies, employees and communities.

If banking is under attack, then chief financial officers are the defenders of the realm. Equipped with the numbers, they are uniquely positioned to bring the credible answers their stakeholders seek and the changes their companies need.

Banks want all loans held in portfolio to be classified as ultrasafe regardless of the underwriting characteristics or of a bank's asset size. But consumer activists and independent mortgage lenders are raising red flags ahead of possible Senate Banking action.

American Express Co. was ordered to drop many rules that prohibit merchants from asking customers to use less-expensive credit cards.

It was a busy Thursday for NCUA, as it placed New Bethel Federal Credit Union, Portsmouth, Va., into conservatorship, and liquidated TLC Federal Credit Union of Tillamook, Ore.

NCUA officials still have several more months of work ahead of them before they unveil a comprehensive overhaul of their Field of Membership rules, but the agency completed a kind of trial run Thursday, approving a much narrower amendment to the rules governing associational common bonds.

If banks and retailers want a piece of the mobile wallet pie that Apple Pay is steadily gobbling up, Nacha says it has a formula to achieve that.

NCUA is poised to address associational common bonds, a prelude to its reinterpretation of field of membership, at its monthly board meeting Thursday morning. The move comes just days after receiving a new record number of comment letters on risk-based capital. The difference, credit unions are actually looking forward to the FOM proposal, while comments filed on RBC remained largely negative, ranging from calls to can the proposal entirely to revising the already-much-revised rule.

MasterCard Inc. is "keen" on taking advantage of opportunities in China and could establish domestic operations in that country by the end of 2016, Chief Executive Officer Ajay Banga said.

As Coinbase makes its services available in the U.K., Ripple Labs is making inroads with Western Union.

WASHINGTON — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby offered a few hints Wednesday about what to expect from pending regulatory relief legislation due next month.

Regulators can avoid extensive, after-the-fact investigations of banks' illegal actions by standardizing the form and content of transaction data so they can spot compliance problems in real time.

MasterCard Inc. posted first-quarter profit that beat analysts' estimates as consumer-card spending accelerated outside the U.S.

A step-by-step look at GE Capital's breakup plan and its likely aftermath, including recent comments by bankers who may be looking to buy various parts.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is urging banks to reevaluate how they use credit bureaus like ChexSystems, after his investigation found that inaccurate data reported by banks is preventing some consumers from opening checking and savings accounts. Three banks already have agreed to modify their use of ChexSystems in screening potential customers.

The German bank's massive strategic overhaul will include cutting key businesses and leaving 10 countries, but it plans to invest in the U.S. despite all the regulatory troubles it has had here.

For more than a decade, U.S. regulators have been advising bankers to know more about their customers than who they are. In the next five years that may become the global norm as technology allows more granular transaction monitoring.

Large foreign firms are facing key decisions about the size of their footprint here as they approach a Federal Reserve Board requirement to form a separate holding company to house their U.S. subsidiaries.

HSBC Holdings executives said little about the future of their U.S. bank and other underperforming businesses at a sometimes contentious annual shareholder meeting Friday.

DAYTON, Ohio — The Superintendent of the Ohio Division of Financial Institutions on Thursday placed Montgomery County Credit Union, Inc., into conservatorship and appointed the National Credit Union Administration as agent for the conservator.