Credit

Richard Smith came to Capitol Hill this week to speak about the massive breach at Equifax, but it was clear Tuesday that he will be defending the entire credit reporting industry.

Richard Smith came to Capitol Hill this week to speak about the massive breach at Equifax, but it was clear Tuesday that he will be defending the entire credit reporting industry.

The recent Equifax breach wasn't just a failing of one company's digital defenses — it exposed a fundamental weakness of how the entire financial services industry handles consumer identity. What's surprising is how deep the problem goes.

Equifax Inc.’s former chief executive officer said the credit-reporting company didn’t meet its responsibility to protect sensitive consumer information, confirming that the failure to fix a software vulnerability months ago led to the theft of more than 140 million Americans’ personal data.

Tim Welsh has spent his first two months on the job thinking about how to make U.S. Bank as central to consumers’ lives as Amazon, develop new personal financial management services, and expand into new cities.

Equifax Inc.’s board of directors has formed a special committee to review the sales of stock that executives made days after the company found out it was hacked.

Not only will banks be on the hook for counterfeit loans to identity thieves, but they will likely lose loan volume, and ultimately revenue, from changes in consumer behavior.

Yes, the credit bureau goofed badly on data security, and it proved to be worse at crisis management. But other companies have been just as sloppy with cyber defenses, and business and government leaders should have tackled these problems long before now.

Equifax Inc. will debut a new service that will permanently give consumers the ability to lock and unlock their credit for free.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., plans to reintroduce legislation requiring the IRS to fast-track income verification, which proponents say could reduce the financial industry's dependence on credit bureaus.

It’s not just consumers who are worried about identity theft. For the millions of business owners who rely on their personal credit to finance operations, damage to credit scores could have dire consequences.

As Equifax sheds its top execs, more experts are casting attention on the business practice of charging consumers for monitoring their personal data at bureaus that otherwise give them little control over their financial identities.

Equifax observed an increasingly well-worn ritual of scandal-ridden firms by jettisoning CEO Richard Smith: apologize, promise to do better in the future, and sacrifice your top executive in the hopes it will ward off action by Congress and regulators.

Inevitably, Equifax’s CEO Richard Smith has left his post. For the credit bureau's sake, let's hope it has a long-term plan that's better than promoting from within.

Barb Godin is one of two women on the 15-member operating committee at Regions Financial.

Summit Credit Union in Madison, Wis., has filed what's believed to be the first lawsuit by a financial institution in connection with the massive data breach.

The hearings before the Senate Banking Committee have high stakes for both companies, as lawmakers are expected to ask the CEOs whether they should be fired.

Data breaches and payment hacks require not only tech measures, but crisis management. Had Equifax gotten out in front of the story, particularly during the slow news period of August, it would have earned kudos and perhaps mitigated some of the public scrutiny.

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.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called for bipartisan action against Equifax during a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, criticizing the credit bureau for waiting several weeks after a massive data breach to reveal it to the public.