Bank channel

If the financial industry were made up of nursery rhymes, Wells Fargo & Co. would be Little Jack Horner and Bank of America Corp. would be regarded as Pinocchio.

WASHINGTON — Under a federal rule approved Monday, regulators will use a "two-stage process" to decide whether certain companies that facilitate clearing transactions are systemically important.

WASHINGTON — With the administration choosing someone to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who may draw more GOP opposition than Elizabeth Warren, some insiders speculated the White House may be open to compromise over the bureau's structure to win confirmation for Richard Cordray.

Richard Cordray, the enforcement chief at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will be named to lead the new regulator, the Obama administration said Sunday.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney is laying off financial advisors, but the big bank denies that it has any major layoff planned, as was reported earlier this week by Fox Business News.

Revenue growth without loan growth is possible — if you are JPMorgan Chase & Co. For other banks, the question remains: Can they figure out how to drive the topline higher without collecting more interest from borrowers?

When Matt Weidler made the long walk from his desk to the automated teller machine and realized he had forgotten his ATM card yet again, he decided the best thing to do was to reinvent the ATM.

Capital One surprised observers by coming to market with a $2 billion common stock offering intended to help pay for the $9 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of ING Group NV's U.S. online banking unit.

Some may wonder how a watchdog with no head can do much watching, but that’s the current state of affairs as the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the administrations key financial reform programs coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, officially opens for business on July 21.

Without a permanent director in place, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gave fair warning Tuesday it plans to start monitoring the industry's largest banks for consumer abuses in just over a week.

While other regulators busily check off implementation goals set by last year's financial reform law, the new body charged with limiting threats to the financial system is getting lost in the shuffle.

With a 98% retention rate, USAA Federal Savings Bank seems to have little room to improve customer service. But it's spent the past two years and millions of dollars overhauling systems to do just that.

While some bankers are secretly gleeful the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does not yet have a director, they are the ones likely to pay a heavy price as a result.

PayPal revolutionized how consumers pay for goods online. It's not about to be usurped by the mobile payments movement. Its parent, eBay Inc., is paying $240 million to buy Zong, a company that allows consumers to charge purchases to their phone bills.

While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. made significant progress Wednesday toward building its new resolution regime, it left a key component still on the table.

Increases in initial public offerings would normally benefit banks, but a recent surge in IPO activity is instead threatening to further shrink lenders' balance sheets.

Plans to force the largest banks to hold as much as 2.5% more capital would put them at a competitive disadvantage to smaller institutions.

Did the Treasury Department act inappropriately when it sent a highly publicized — and very critical — comment letter to its own bureau objecting to a pending proposal? That's the question that was sparked in policy circles this week after the Obama administration blasted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's preemption plan, arguing it violated the intent of the Dodd-Frank Act.

USAA, a financial institution and insurance provider serving military service people and their families, topped the latest J.D. Power & Associates' survey of self-directed investors' satisfaction while Merrill Edge, Bank of America Merrill Lynch's consumer brokerage unit, checked in last.

As part of a continuing effort to streamline its retail brokerage business, Wells Fargo & Company this week said it will sell its H.D. Vest financial services business to private equity firm Parthenon Capital Partners.