Economy

Citigroup is testing Bluetooth beacon technology in a pilot that gives customers cardless access to branch ATMs after business hours, among other services.

First Connecticut Bancorp in Farmington has committed to making $5 million in small-business loans over the next year.

To expand the reach of its global e-commerce services, Ingenico ePayments is building up a vast network of connections to merchant acquirers, hoping to gain a competitive edge as the demand grows for omnichannel payments.

Key factors point to marketplace lenders rebounding from their recent setbacks and continuing their growth.

If alternative small-business lenders don't get engaged in the regulatory dialogue, they risk letting a few bad apples determine their fate.

It is imperative for regulators and lawmakers to approach the online small business loan market with care and an understanding of how these lenders expand access to credit.

State officials in California have asked top online lending firms a series of probing questions regarding their compliance with laws and regulations dealing with referral fees, bank partnerships, fair lending and other sensitive issues.

We should all understand now that pure gain-on-sale marketplace lending businesses, like LendingClub, are inherently unstable.

The abrupt resignation of the firm's founder and CEO, under a cloud, seems likely to fan investors' growing fears about the marketplace lending sector. It could also hasten regulatory scrutiny.

The Consumer Mortgage Coalition is arguing that the bill has serious flaws by allowing private insurers to undercut pricing on federal flood insurance policies by offering high deductibles and exclusions to homeowners with mortgages guaranteed by the government-sponsored enterprises.

State Bank Financial in Atlanta just hired a lending team that will take its SBA lending operation to the next level. The moves comes as the SBA reports a record number of 7(a) loans.

The Federal Reserve deserves praise for a proposal that would strengthen financial stability by eliminating the rights of counterparties to tear up derivatives contracts in a failure.

Square's practice of using its merchant transaction data for risk analysis may seem innovative, but other other agile specialists—including Intuit—are finding ways to use new data streams to limit risk and deliver funds to borrowers.

Loan growth at several Boston banks, including many former mutuals, is higher than the national average. Still, bankers are closely watching for any indication that a bubble is forming.

Banking is often seen as a quintessentially modern institution. But financial practices are deeply rooted in the medieval period.

Mobile wallets may not have eliminated cash and cards, but they are becoming almost unavoidable in many retail settings. However, there are still a few areas where mobile technology is slow to arrive.

Though many have tried and failed to get bitcoin into the mainstream, iPayYou CEO Gene Kavner is ready to take a page out of the playbook of Amazon.com, his former employer, to bring attention to his new bitcoin wallet.

Most of the largest banks are participating in industrywide blockchain standard-setting activities, trying to determine which use cases would improve upon existing technology. That's backward, says Chain, a startup whose product is already being used by banks.

Going forward, Fannie Mae will be relying more on loan guarantee fee income from its single-family and multifamily businesses.

Students with excess cash but no bank account have fallen victim to predatory financial vendors, but the government can take steps to bypass the middleman.