Kate Berry

Since taking over in 2010, Moynihan has been negotiator-in-chief. Now he faces an equally daunting challenge: nudging the nation’s second-largest bank back to growth.

But large banks have narrowed the gap as they have made a more concerted effort to better explain their fee structures to disgruntled customers.

Though banks have always measured customer satisfaction, there is a greater focus now on understanding exactly what drives the customer experience and how it can help the bottom line.

An aggressive push by the Justice Department to investigate fair lending claims is prompting a backlash from bankers who claim the government is abusing its authority and contradicting findings by other federal regulators.

David Stevens arrived as a commissioner at the Federal Housing Administration in 2009 vowing to restore financial discipline to a government housing body facing the stresses of a post-crash world. A former mortgage banker himself, Stevens, now 54, bolstered the agency's finances and pursued alleged wrongdoing at nonbank lenders including Berkshire Hathaway and Goldman Sachs & Co. affiliates.

Citing "regulations written for banking institutions," the insurance giant has put its $16 billion-asset depository on the block. MetLife, which ranks among the top 15 home lenders, would continue writing mortgages. But it would do so as part of the so-called shadow banking system.

With the macroeconomic outlook still glum, housing prices still depressed and the FHA's grip on the market for low-down payment loans still intact, the mortgage insurers are stuck in the same rut. New business volume remains down sharply from pre-crisis levels, the insurers continue to pay out hefty claims on soured mortgage loans, and the forecast for when the industry returns to profitability is again murky at best.

Bank of America Corp. will pay $20 million and Morgan Stanley $2.35 million for improperly foreclosing on members of the military — some of whom were on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan — under a settlement with the Justice Department.

MetLife Bank, a unit of the MetLife Inc., has catapulted from relative obscurity in banking to become the seventh-largest depository and a contender in mortgages.

It remains to be seen whether institutions that are in better financial shape than Bank of America and Ally Financial will accept olive branches from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

To quell doubts about its mortgage unit's handling of documents, Bank of America Corp. is distancing itself from … itself.