Risk

An uptick in fines associated with anti-money-laundering failures demonstrates that U.S. banks still have much work to do in terms of optimizing their internal systems to identify and stop the flow of dirty money.

Banks are not likely to see their regulatory capital requirements decline any time soon. But the way capital levels are calculated could be made more reflective of real risks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Texas banking regulators issued consent orders against Industry State Bank, Fayetteville Bank and Citizens State Bank, requiring major overhauls of their management, capital and risk controls.

There is a tendency to assume that banks carrying a large commercial real estate loan portfolio need to diversify. But that ignores the fact that many of those institutions have much deeper knowledge of the market than their critics.

A new academic paper dives into the key factors that have caused bank failures over the past 160 years.

As the commercial real estate industry sputters along, lenders, investors and analysts are putting less stock in loan-to-value ratios, a longtime bellwether of risk.

Tim Ryan, who joined the megabank in June, will work with COO Anand Selva to oversee enhancements to Citigroup's data integrity systems, according to a memo.

Independence Bank of Kentucky said 14 customers had reported receiving the bills, which included text such as "for motion picture purposes."

The regional bank has already seen a large reduction in "criticized" loans, and it expects that trend to pick up as lower borrowing costs alleviate the pain in the commercial real estate sector.

Prophecies about a wave of bank failures caused by sickly CRE loans haven't yet come true. But there are still plenty of caution signs in a saga that will take years to play out.

The Canadian bank expects to spend more than $3 billion on U.S. regulatory penalties in connection with its anti-money-laundering problems. "It's easy in a bank of our size to sometimes not look at accountabilities as clearly as we should," CEO Bharat Masrani said.

Cannabis is becoming a big business in the U.S., but companies in the field still struggle to find financing. A broadly accepted way of assessing their creditworthiness would be a huge help.

Banks are concerned about the lack of clarity regarding legal liability in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's open banking rule, and fear that they will end up on the hook for data breaches or unauthorized transactions caused by a fintech or data provider.

Nonbanks that rely on sponsor banks to underpin their financial services may assume that "going direct" is safer after the Synapse bankruptcy. But banking-as-a-service middleware has its merits.

Congress publicly excoriated the supervisors and CEOs of last year's trifecta of megabank failures. But, what about the directors who were supposedly overseeing those CEOs? The entire chain of bank oversight needs to be rethought from congressional hearing rooms to banking board rooms.

Lincoln Savings Bank and Vantage Bank are two new clients of banking-as-a-service provider Unit. They say it improves their ability to 'go direct' rather than hinder it.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked the Federal Reserve to require public reporting of synthetic risk transfers — also known as credit risk transfers, or CRTs — through bank call reports and systemic risk reports.