Law and regulation

EBay Inc. Director Marc Andreessen struck back at activist investor Carl Icahn, who has accused the venture capitalist of conflicts of interest for his role in the company's sale of videoconferencing service Skype.

Charles Taylor, a senior official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said certain highly complex branches of foreign-owned institutions are being subjected to aspects of the agency's "heightened expectations" program.

Rules enacted last year appear to be steadily forcing banks to exit the mortgage servicing business, transferring such rights to nonbanks. The situation is stoking fears on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that regulators went too far.

More credit card companies are offering free credit scores to their customers as they look for ways to distinguish their products from those of their rivals.

WASHINGTON -- Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Narayana Kocherlakota will become the next chair of the Financial Services Policy Committee starting on March 17.

Regulators continue to make Bank Secrecy Act compliance one of their top priorities, according to newly available information on enforcement actions.

What is different postcrisis is that the actions of a minority of bankers have saddled the finance sector with a greedy, ethics-challenged image that may hinder recruiting the best and brightest talent.

Federal regulators are shining an increasingly harsh light on the debt collections practices of banks and third-party agencies, forcing many to drastically alter the ways in which they interact with delinquent consumers. American Banker outlines the changes underway and how they may trickle down to collections efforts around the nation.

Mary Miller, the acting Deputy Treasury Secretary, said regulators should coordinate and consistently apply tougher rules on financial institutions as they implement post-crisis reforms.

The GSEs reported big profits for 2013 but even the companies' executives question the sustainability of those earnings.

Bruce Berkowitz, the money manager battling the U.S. government over the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is calling on the boards of the mortgage-finance giants to build capital instead of turning over their profits to the Treasury now that they've returned to profitability.

Citigroup Inc. (C), the third-biggest U.S. bank, said its Banamex USA unit received grand jury subpoenas related to compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and federal anti-money-laundering requirements.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is getting serious about getting to know its customers.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. received a subpoena regarding the return rate for its payment-processor clients from the U.S. Department of Justice and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

"It would have made a lot more sense to bring back Glass-Steagall," a pre-and-post crisis risk manager tells American Banker Editor in Chief Neil Weinberg, while discussing Washington’s Dodd-Frank solution.

PNC Financial Services received a subpoena regarding the return rate for its payment-processor clients from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Excavators have begun tearing down 1,500 dilapidated homes in Flint, Mich., in an attempt to lift the housing market. The funding for the work comes from a surprising source — the Hardest Hit Fund of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency shuttered the $130 million-asset Millennium Bank in Sterling, Va., while Pennsylvania state regulators closed the $63 million-asset Vantage Bank in Horsham, Pa.

Evidence of fraud at Citigroup's Mexican unit may be endangering its reputational recovery from the financial crisis, and has prompted unusually blunt, and angry, public language from CEO Michael Corbat.

Union Bank in San Francisco and its Japanese parent company plan a series of changes to its corporate names and structure, all in response to the Federal Reserve Board's plan to overhaul the way it supervises foreign banks.