Law and legal issues

The STATES 2.0 Act, currently pending in Congress, would go a long way toward giving banks confidence that they can provide services to legal cannabis businesses without putting themselves in legal jeopardy.

The Department of Justice is seeking to terminate a Biden-era lending discrimination settlement with Lakeland Bank. Last month, the DOJ took similar action in a case involving Mississippi-based Trustmark National Bank.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Bank Policy Institute filed twin motions for summary judgement to strike down a 2024 agency rule for being arbitrary and capricious and exceeding statutory authority.

Three current and former employees of the New York City-based bank allege that executives made racist comments, misused corporate money and retaliated against protected complaints.

Regulators say the Mississippi-based depository satisfied the terms of the $5 million settlement it reached with Biden administration officials in 2021.

Agency lawyers called the rule, which was almost a decade in the making, "unlawful" in a court filing.

The regulator says its prior amicus brief, which cited the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and sided with borrowers, was no longer valid.

As the class action lawsuit settlement industry became overwhelmed with fraud, a bank and a fraud scoring company teamed up to fight back.

The state supreme court agreed to review the ruling in favor of a group of Wall Street banks that whistleblower Edelweiss said cost the state at least $100 million.

Jackie Reses stirred debate by dismissing debanking as largely fictional during a Tuesday summit attended by many crypto-focused fintechs.

The tentative settlement represents a step toward resolving an issue that hung over Capital One's acquisition of Discover. That blockbuster deal closed on Sunday.

Firing 90% of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's staff and stripping it down to "the statutory studs" is lawful, an attorney for the CFPB told an appeals court.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is accusing Capital One of deliberately deceiving customers and obscuring higher interest rates. The lawsuit comes less than three months after the CFPB dropped a similar case against the bank.

The Financial Technology Association will now defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's open banking rule after the Trump administration sided with banks that sued the agency.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has dismissed or withdrawn from more than 20 lawsuits as the Trump administration reverses the work done during the Biden era.

New regulations implementing the Community Reinvestment Act are likely to run into trouble unless they take into account the priorities of the Trump administration and its efforts to streamline the federal government.

Jim Richards, who served as the bank's head of anti-money-laundering compliance, says the Federal Reserve is wrongfully denying him compensation that was designed to keep him employed at Wells Fargo.

The man who blew the whistle over the incident says the bank fired him in retaliation for reporting what he called a "significant security breach."

Julian, the bank's onetime audit chief, recently agreed to settle with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a tiny percentage of the $7 million the agency had been seeking. In an interview, he spoke about the expensive legal fight and who bears responsibility for the bank's fake-accounts scandal.

Despite its commitment to change its stress testing program, the Federal Reserve is defending its current practices in court. That argument raises thorny legal questions about whether stress tests are more like rules or adjudications.