Politics

Banks want to reclaim their position as the central node in the customer relationship by charging fintechs and data aggregators for access to permissioned customer data. How the legal questions about this are resolved will be a telling moment for all concerned.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau doubles its anticipated rulemaking agenda from last year, even as bureau employees expect mass layoffs.

The Federal Reserve said it would rescind its novel activities supervision program created to monitor how banks use emerging tech.

Advocates warned the Federal Housing Finance Agency that allowing cryptocurrency assets to be used in the underwriting of Fannie and Freddie mortgages risks taxpayer losses and market instability.

The 2021 executive order had called on bank regulators to apply more scrutiny to bank deals. Trump-era regulators have already started rolling back those policies.

The GENIUS Act would allow Special Purpose Depository Institutions, which are state-chartered uninsured banks, to expand to other states without the approval of state bank regulators, a provision that's now drawing criticism from consumer advocates and banking lobbyists.

An Office of Inspector General audit says the agency's existing program for overseeing banks' technology providers lacks clear goals and metrics. It recommends the adoption of a new risk-ranking methodology by 2026.

Noelle Acheson pulls the bill that would ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency into the spotlight and argues that it's overreaching, unnecessary and distracts attention from more pressing privacy issues.

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee said the Fed is not tied to Wall Street or political interests and that independence is necessary to prevent inflation.

Bank groups, especially those representing the largest institutions, did little in the way of a public campaign against the provisions in the stablecoin bill that could disintermediate traditional banking, but are picking up steam for the upcoming market structure fight.