Legal issues and news

The scheme is used by borrowers who don't have enough income to qualify for a regular mortgage, so they apply for a higher-rate non-owner-occupied loan.

After the departure of Financial Crimes Enforcement Network's director last month, the future of the Treasury Department unit remains the subject of fierce speculation within the financial services industry.

WASHINGTON — Marijuana businesses and banks looking to open their doors to the potentially lucrative clients suffered a blow Wednesday after House Republicans blocked an amendment that would have prevented federal regulators from pursuing enforcement actions against banks dealing with the businesses in states with legalized pot.

WASHINGTON — Banks in states with legal marijuana businesses may warm up to them as customers if an amendment to a Senate appropriations bill becomes law.

The Federal Reserve Board is getting an earful from critics within and without the financial industry over its proposal to limit banks' credit exposures to a single entity.

A vendor-created messaging network has attracted hundreds of community banks, many of which have decided it is easier to stop financial crime as a group.

Many financial criminals are switching to a more sophisticated kind of identity theft in which they open accounts based on stolen identities, or on composites of information stolen from different people.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network violated the U.S. Constitution by singling out a Tanzanian bank as a money-laundering concern without due process, the bank claimed late last week.

Some days the ride-sharing app receives more than a million phishing emails — a stat to which large banks can relate. But after deploying common protocols and open-source software, Uber now rejects most bad emails.

The drumbeat of news about hackers stealing millions of dollars by gaming the Swift interbank messaging system should have been a wake-up call for banking executives, but it's unclear how many of them answered it. Is it too late for them to shore up their defenses?

The compliance technology company Trace International has launched what it bills as the first global, commercial beneficial ownership registry.

In her final congressional appearance before she leaves her job at the end of this week, Fincen Director Jennifer Shasky Calvery also advocated for passage of new anti-money-laundering laws being pushed by the Obama administration.

Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, introduced legislation Thursday to reform consumer credit reporting.

The banking industry has influenced several key features in the final beneficial ownership rule, a top official at the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said this week, while defending the rule's effectiveness.

Biscayne Bank in Miami, a community bank that focuses on serving high-net-worth individuals from the Caribbean and Latin America, has been named as an intermediary in the Panama Papers leak.

Huntington Bancshares is the latest institution to add a cybersecurity expert to its board, highlighting the growing importance of guarding against hackers and other online dangers.

The rub is that the global messaging system's security is only as strong as the weakest link.

A long-awaited final rule published this week that requires banks to keep better track of the owners of companies with accounts at their institutions is too little, too late in combating money laundering and terrorism financing, according to financial crime specialists.

Advocates for the marijuana industry fanned out across Capitol Hill on Thursday, urging lawmakers to make it easier for pot businesses to be bank customers.

While bitcoin is viewed as "secret currency," the technology behind the cryptocurrency is immensely useful to financial services companies in preventing hacking.