BankThink

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.

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.

Under the Biden administration, a trio of regulatory agencies have teamed up to limit consumers' access to credit. The incoming administration should force them to stand down.

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

President-elect Trump's embrace of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance is a political gambit that has already paid off. But greenlighting crypto's intermingling with traditional finance would create an asset bubble that would be especially painful to pop.

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 technology has the potential to democratize access to knowledge about financial services, but like any tool, it must be used carefully and responsibly.

As the banking industry becomes increasingly technology-dependent, wise bank leaders recognize that a bank is not solely defined by its buildings, technology or pricing. It is human connections that truly set a bank apart.

The U.S. is well behind other countries in implementing open banking and delivering its benefits to customers. Brazil's success in that area can serve as a useful model.

"Too big to fail" banking giants like to masquerade as community banks when it suits their purposes, but they will never be able to replace real, local bankers with deep ties to their customers.