Economy

The Federal Housing Finance Agency may face legislation or a lawsuit in the near future as it tries to force captive insurance companies to exit the Federal Home Loan Bank System.

Telcos, banks and technology companies have all taken their shots at mobile wallets, but as mobile commerce matures, the niche players are reaping the biggest rewards, according to Remitly CEO Matt Oppenheimer.

Digital Asset Holdings, the blockchain technology startup led by Wall Street veteran Blythe Masters, has raised more than $50 million in funding and expanded its board, the company said Thursday.

Opus Bank in Irvine, Calif., is the latest bank to partner with an online lender, announcing an agreement Thursday to refer certain small-business customers to OnDeck Capital.

LendUp, which makes subprime consumer loans online and over mobile phones, announced Wednesday that it has raised $50 million in equity funding, plus an additional $100 million in debt financing.

It may seem odd for a vendor of payment acceptance hardware to discredit EMV security, which is commonly seen as a catalyst for hardware sales, but that's exactly what MagTek is doing.

BlueVine, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that is aiming to modernize the invoice-financing business, announced a new fundraising round on Wednesday.

The Current Expected Loss Credit model will help to quantify bankers' intuition and can be built with readily available data.

LoanHero, an online lender specializing in consumer loans at the cash register, announced that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Online lenders like Aprenita, Payability and Pollen VC have all launched within the last 13 months to fill a need they say is not being met by traditional banks, and only partially by venture capitalists and invoice-financing companies.

In one corner are groups like the Community Home Lenders Association and the major credit union groups, which are hoping the administration will further cut premiums after a reduction a year ago. In the other are the MBA and the ICBA, which argue a cut now would be too soon.

International events like the Davos economic forum should remind business leaders of the importance of being stewards and of having workforce diversity.

A number of community banks have gotten into government-backed small-business lending by buying firms or poaching talent. While the business seems lucrative now, there are concerns that too many banks may be jumping into the pool.

Banks operating on legacy systems created 30 to 40 years ago are becoming far more open to working with third-party innovators, which have no interest in the baggage that would accompany becoming a direct competitor to the banks themselves.

Executives of Wells Fargo, especially CEO John Stumpf, have repeatedly insisted that the economy (and their bank) will be fine despite the collapse in oil prices. But now they are acknowledging efforts to think about what happens if they are wrong.

An international regulatory body said this week that they are looking at setting new, enhanced leverage ratio requirements for the largest global banks, a move that echoes the higher standards in the U.S.' supplemental leverage ratio and demonstrates why going beyond international accords can influence the rest of the world.

The reverse mortgage industry is optimistic after recent reforms to the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage by the FHA and newfound respect from financial planners.

Financial services issues that helped define a presidency were largely absent from Tuesday's State of the Union address, including the crucial policy items that have not yet been resolved.

Prediction markets are the opposite of "yes men" — they're designed to induce experts to show what they really think. Could large banks, among the most siloed, opaque and politicized organizations around, use internal prediction markets to learn hard truths?

"Omnichannel" is an increasingly common term in the payments technology industry, but it means different things to different people.