Bank channel

With regulators struggling to decide which loans to excuse from risk-retention, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said Thursday the best option would have been to shelve the exemption altogether.

The Treasury Department has swapped the carrot for the stick for three of the largest participants in the administration's foreclosure prevention program.

A FINRA arbitration panel has ordered two former Morgan Stanley Smith Barney brokers to pay the firm $4.28 million plus interest for breach of promissory notes and other agreements.

After a couple years of strong growth and impressive returns in the market, many of Wall Street's biggest investment banks are reportedly considering some headcount reductions to cut costs.

In banking, the phrase "expense reduction" is often a euphemism for "layoffs." The chief financial officers of Comerica Inc. and Huntington Bancshares Inc. avoided the L-word when speaking to investors on Wednesday but said their institutions are prepared to cut workers if revenue stays weak or the economy gets worse.

Painful consolidation is coming to community banks, and the biggest determinant of which companies will survive is the quality of senior management, particularly the chief executive.

Although banks failed in their attempt to convince Congress to delay an interchange fee cap for debit cards, the financial services industry is not giving up, just changing venues.

Banks appeared to be gaining the upper hand in their battle against retailers to delay pending interchange fee caps, but the fight was far from over.

Giant financial institutions and wirehouses that spent fortunes attracting and retaining top-producing brokers and wealth managers over the past few years may be about to get socked with a big wave of departures this year and, especially, in 2012.

Forget ATM machines. Financial institutions that want to stay competitive are going to have to work the phones if they want to hang on to their customers in the future. That is to say, they’ll have to make their services accessible by smartphone.

After a few years of bargain hunting, it looks like buyers are willing to pay up for bank branches. Data on deals announced so far this year shows a median deposit premium of 4%, an improvement of more than 60 basis points from the levels of the last two years.

Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, one of the most outspoken members of the Federal Open Market Committee, has never been shy when it comes to his opinion.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s push into California is a blessing or a curse, depending whom you ask, but it is definitely having a competitive impact.

BNY Mellon said that it had begun expanding its middle office outsourcing service for hedge funds to North America and Asia.

Google Inc. isn't asking for a share of the payments revenue generated with its new mobile wallet. Nevertheless, partnering with the search engine juggernaut could be a trade-off for banks.

Good times are just around the bend. The length of that bend depends on who you talk to.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. boss James Dimon rode out the financial crisis with one of the most stable management teams in the financial world. That might be about to change.

Depending on which political party you talk to, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is either the most powerful federal agency ever created, or the most constrained.

New study finds banks -- large and small -- need to do a better job of implementing the technology and processes necessary to curtail money laundering activity in order to avoid the stiff fines already levied on their peers.

Consolidation is a fact of life in banking, so it's easy to shrug off dire predictions that the next wave of mergers will swamp the community banking sector. But the case is becoming ever more convincing.