As the consumer lender announced its seventh consecutive profitable quarter, its CEO bragged that his company is better positioned than the likes of Goldman Sachs and LendingClub.

Banks spend heavily on marketing to win deposits, push digital; Wells Fargo bends to critics in its latest response to scandals; FDIC review of brokered deposits has big implications for branches; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Among the lessons David Hijirida learned at the online giant: Companies are often so focused on competitors that they neglect their own customers.

The payment systems within these games are conducive to various types of fraud, including account takeovers, that can result in crippling chargeback claims, according to Suresh Dakshina, president of Chargeback Gurus.

Criminals are going to get smarter, but banks can implement a modern authentication solution to meet unique use cases and security requirements without sacrificing user convenience, writes Mike Byrnes, senior product manager at Entrust Datacard.

Thanks to big tech companies, the business world is moving to third-party platforms, or online marketplaces where buyers pull sellers' products off digital shelves. A growing number of financial institutions — including BBVA, Citi and community banks like Eastern — say they can't afford to sit out the trend.

Gatsby, which has built an app to let novice investors buy puts or calls, has received funding from Barclays, Radius Bank and others. Radius is considering offering the service to its customers.

The McLean, Va.-based institution is launching a digital division that will create content that touches on topics beyond banking.

Payment companies and businesses that want to leverage blockchain need to properly connect the decentralized platform they use to existing databases and back-end systems, writes IIya Pupko, chief architect at Jitterbit.

The deal between the U.S. bank and the U.K. software firm adds another potential payments rival for Swift, and the two companies will offer banking APIs to U.S. fintechs.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication is testing a link between e-commerce and trading platforms within its Global Payments Innovation network, with the first trial taking place on the Corda blockchain platform.

Banks use anti-money-laundering and fraud systems to try to catch scams that prey on senior citizens. A few, including Wells Fargo, are working on artificial intelligence that could spot them even earlier.

Big data and artificial intelligence will allow banks to do more for small businesses, former SBA head Karen Mills argues.

Fixing the housing finance system is "the last piece of unaddressed business from the financial crisis," according to a summary of to-do items released by the Banking Committee's chairman.

Apple has strived to portray Apple Pay as the trusted, go-to mobile payment option for its customer base, but the company's own security problems have undermined this effort.

CrediFi helps bankers pursuing commercial real estate loan growth minimize the risk in lending to customers they historically haven't served.

The New York based Petal uses machine learning to optimize the limited financial data available for low-information consumer groups and millennials, who often turn to installment loans from companies such as Affirm, Klarna and PayPal Credit.

There’s no reason for the central bank to prohibit nonbank financial firms from entering the payments system as long as appropriate rules are put in place to protect against risk.

The 35-day partial government closing was a stark reminder that many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and financial firms need to help solve that problem, the mobile banking firm’s CEO says.

Despite complaints about the slow pace of change within government, policymakers, including agency heads, are increasingly focused on modernizing regulation, an important step forward for the industry.