Unity Bank in Clinton, NJ, now offers EV charging stations in a collaboration with Encore Energy Group; fintech Beneficient announced its agreement to acquire Puerto Rico-based Mercantile Bank; Trump named payments exec Jared Isaacman to run NASA; and more in this week's banking news roundup.

With a business-friendly crypto and AI overseer, observers expect a softer government approach to tech projects and partnerships.

While it's true that the National Credit Union Administration needs the authority to regulate third-party vendors, credit unions themselves have considerable power to force vendors to observe best practices.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council's annual report underscores mounting challenges in commercial real estate, escalating cyber threats, and regulatory gaps in third-party services and stablecoins, urging stronger oversight and legislative action.

There is a major opportunity out there, especially for community banks, to displace predatory lenders and earn a healthy return at the same time. It's just a question of making the leap.

A bot from nCino lets people in the commercial lending department quickly find information in loan documents and in policy manuals that are hundreds of pages long.

A collaboration with Booking.com is designed to encourage consumers to use the bank to manage airline tickets and hotels, a lucrative market that's drawing attention across the financial services industry.

President-elect Donald Trump is nominating Frank Bisignano, the chief executive officer of fintech and payments company Fiserv Inc., to be the commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

The FDIC, OCC, NCUA and Fed each signed onto a letter that detailed strategies for mitigating financial crimes against older Americans.

Rep. French Hill, R-Ark. — one of the leading contenders to chair the House Financial Services Committee next year — focused on 'debanking' of crypto and other companies in his questions to the witnesses.

Artificial intelligence systems built to assess creditworthiness are trained on data that implicitly accepts past discriminatory lending decisions as legitimate signals about borrowers today.

The three largest deals had an average round amount of more than $121 million.

The order stemmed from a cybersecurity breach in 2022. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency also lifted the bank's "troubled condition" status.

In a report Tuesday, credit bureau Experian predicted that government identity systems could get an update in the coming year. Here's what else could happen.

The demand for embedded finance is not going away, but the initial rollout of banking as a service relied far too much on middleware providers without expertise in compliance and oversight. BaaS 2.0 must feature a more bank-centric approach.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a proposal to protect consumer data privacy and categorize data brokers that sell sensitive consumer data as "consumer reporting agencies" under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a move that could garner bipartisan support.

Banks have been returning some funds to fintech customers affected by the Synapse collapse, but a multimillion-dollar discrepancy between how much Synapse says customers are owed and how much the banks say they have remains.

The two bills would require banking agencies to study artificial intelligence and its application in the banking sector, and would codify findings from an earlier AI working group formed by the committee.

As 2024 comes to a close, trends such as open banking, fights over credit card fees and the future of faster payments are still in flux.