Blog

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  • November 7, 2014
    Election Day Membership Call Recap Tuesday was a historic day as the GOP took control of the U.S. Senate and expanded its majority in the House to the largest amount since 1928. With a new majority comes new leadership. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) is poised to become chair of the Senate Banking Committee for the next two years, while Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) remains as House Financial Services...
  • October 31, 2014
    Fed OIG Report on CFPB Released The U.S. Federal Reserve's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report this week entitled, "The OIG's List of Major Challenges for the CFPB." The report's findings include: The CFPB still has yet to meet internal goals for the timely issuance of examination reports. The OIG rightly notes delays "...leave supervised institutions uncertain about the CFPB'...
  • October 24, 2014
    The thoughts and prayers of Team CBA are with our Canadian friends during this time of mourning. We stand with them against terrorism and extremism. 2015: The Year of Perfecting the CFPB The upcoming midterm elections and a possible flip of Senate control gives us a fresh opportunity to look at the structure of the CFPB in 2015. I sat down with Marc Hochstein, Editor-in-Chief of American Banker...
  • October 17, 2014
    Regulators: A "Spaghetti Junction" Citigroup's Chairman Michael O'Neill shared some keen observations on the state of our nation's federal banking regulators at a panel sponsored by the Volcker Alliance this week in Washington, D.C. Calling the current regulatory regime a "spaghetti junction," he suggested the system would be better off by combining the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit...
  • October 10, 2014
    CFPB Holds Event on Checking Accounts The CFPB hosted a forum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, October 8, 2014 which focused on consumer access to checking accounts. The event featured remarks from CFPB Director Richard Cordray, as well as presentations and moderated panel discussions. The CFPB focused in on a small percentage of consumers who do not qualify for a traditional checking account...
  • October 3, 2014
    Durbin Amendment Three Years Later – Consumers Pay the Price This week marks the third anniversary of the Durbin Amendment which capped the amount retailers pay to accept debit cards, in theory passing the purported savings onto consumers. However this has not turned out to be the case. Phoenix Marketing International conducted a survey sponsored by the Electronic Payments Coalition which asked 3...
  • September 26, 2014
    CBA-AOL Finance Optimism Drops 4 Points from July The CBA-AOL monthly Finance Optimism Index has found Americans' financial optimism decreased to -7.0. This is a month-over-month drop of 4.0 points, bringing the Index to its lowest point in 2014. All four components of the Index, including perception of current and future finances as well as economic and political news, turned slightly more...
  • September 19, 2014
    Changing of the Guard – CBA's New Chairman Tim Wennes Takes the Reins We were excited to welcome CBA's Board of Directors and Committee Chairs to the Nation's Capital this week. They had a number of productive meetings; highlights include sit-downs with Small Business Administration Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Financial...
  • September 12, 2014
    Home Depot Breach Verified – Brace for Impact This week we learned what many of us had feared -- the mother of all breaches is upon us with the verification of Home Depot's lapsed security. Already many of our banks have identified patterns of behavior consistent with a data breach in certain geographical areas. While fraud seems limited at this moment, cyber-criminals could begin dumping...
  • September 5, 2014
    Possible Home Depot Breach Bigger than Target? The end of the Labor Day holiday came with some unsettling news – a possible massive breach of consumer data at retailer Home Depot. According to KrebsonSecurity, the breach may have impacted data from all 2,200 stores across the U.S. We all recall the breach at Target earlier this year, which resulted in the compromising of 40 million payment card...

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