Compliance

While many people think of Bitcoin as a currency, Jaron Lukasiewicz, CEO and co-founder of Coinsetter, says Bitcoin should be thought of more as a payments infrastructure, allowing quick, inexpensive funds transfer. But for Bitcoin to thrive, banks must agree with this perspective.

Visa and MasterCard have agreed to share their common application identifier technology, enabling EMV-chip based debit transactions to originate from a single application while allowing merchants a choice of networks for routing.

Leaders in emerging payments and virtual currency have formed a committee to establish a self-regulating body to ensure regulatory compliance as the marketplace changes.

PENSACOLA, Fla. – Pen Air has signed with NB Risk Partners, recently acquired by NeighborBranch, for compliance risk management services.

Bitcoin, a decentralized virtual currency, has been declared illegal in Thailand. Members of the Foreign Exchange Administration and Policy Department made the determination at a meeting on July 29 in the Southeastern Asian country, according to a Bitcoin exchange operator in attendance.

It's time credit unions make critical business decisions around mortgage lending and compliance, including staffing levels and reporting alignment, all due to new CFPB rules taking effect next year, urges one expert.

The U.S. migration to EMV is not a mandate, but it might as well be, says one compliance expert, who is also providing some guidance on making the shift to this new payments technology.

Credit unions need to think strategically, subscribe to scale and automate to have any hope of meeting compliance demands.

The confirmation of Richard Cordray to director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau adds some certainty to the compliance picture ahead, including that the clock is ticking on a host of new mortgage compliance rules taking effect in January.

The biggest compliance issues credit unions will face in the next 12 months relate to every step of the mortgage process, and one person says it's going to have an impact on more than just the mortgage department.

Small and mid-size CUs are being urged to pay attention to new rules related to loan participations.

It takes a village to ... keep credit unions in compliance.

Although "CFPB" has become a four-letter word at most CUs, Linda Clampitt said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau actually has done a good job in recent months of producing "how to" guides.

Credit unions feeling overwhelmed by the compliance burden should be looking to their respective state leagues, the league's affiliates and business partners, and even third-party vendors.

NCUA said it is amending its exam process to better protect against fraud-particularly at small credit unions.

Credit unions and banks in the U.S. report they are feeling even greater regulatory and risk management pressures than they were at the beginning of the year.

DNCUA said it will realign its regional supervision effective Jan. 1, 2014.

NCUA said it is building a new risk-based capital framework tailored to protect the industry from losses.

ARLINGTON, Va. – The National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors (NASCUS) has told NCUA it will not support a proposed derivatives regulation in its current form as the proposal would limit the authority of state regulators to supervise derivatives activities in their states.

Visa Inc., which operates the world's biggest electronic-payments network, was sued by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Asda unit, William Morrison Supermarkets Plc and Arcadia Group Plc over payment-processing fees.