True innovation for retail banking comes from building a digital bank that isn’t burdened by legacy products or made up of an amalgamation of fintech patch solutions acquired over the years.

Consumers are increasingly demanding relevant, timely and personalized experiences that can save them time and money. The pandemic illustrated how well organizations in every industry could respond to the opportunity to bring technology and digital delivery together to meet consumer needs. In banking, traditional and non-traditional financial services providers can play an important role in creating open banking opportunities that can serve the institutions while also providing valuable customer experiences.

This essay by Vineyard Holdings provides a deep dive into Ethereum and seeks to pull together the broad thoughts on this topic, as well as offering an analysis of how it compares to existing blockchains.

Webinar to discuss amendments to the UCC to address emerging technological developments including those relating to digital assets and virtual currencies. This program will summarize the initial draft of the amendments as presented to the Uniform Law Commission at the Commission’s annual meeting in July of 2021.

The July consumer price index (CPI) shows inflation in the U.S. is running at a 7.1% pace year-to-date (YTD), the highest seven-month inflation rate since 1982, and is still accelerating. Indeed, pipeline pressures continue to build for higher future inflation, with the producer price index for final demand accelerating to an 11% pace YTD. Prices of processed goods for intermediate demand accelerated to the highest rate since 1975. Inventories have never been reported as low as today, and by a very wide margin, according to the NFIB survey. Coronavirus disruptions combined with massive excess demand from excessively stimulative policy and work disincentives are making it impossible for businesses to restock inventories and catch up to demand.

Deposits at financial institutions are on average 20% to 30% higher than they were before the pandemic, and financial institutions are eager to lend, however, many people are still gauging the best method of moving forward with their finances. BAI provides a projection of how the lending landscape may shake out for the remainder of 2021 and into 2022.

Federal banking regulators have recently released a guide aimed at helping community banks assess risk when considering relationships with financial technology (fintech) companies.

In this article, Brian Riley discusses the future of the Buy Now/Pay Later model, including speculation on how this model will change drastically in the coming years. Riley envisions in the future that a consumer will be pre-approved for a BNPL credit line. Then, as the transaction occurs, funds will get pushed into the debit card to fund the purchase. The liability then will not be on a credit card, but on a BNPL account instead, leaving the debit card to function as the execution vehicle.

Consumers’ newfound digital payment habits have led them to seek out fast, frictionless methods they can use to make purchases instantly and with as little fuss as possible. It is perhaps no surprise that this shift has led to increased demand for P2P payments.

U.S. Bank has been working to up its fintech game for some time now. Cryptocurrency, distributed ledger technology, tokenization of assets, digitization of credit applications, fraud detection, blockchain in foreign exchange conversion and API integrations all fall under U.S. Banks umbrella of fintech goals.

Unlike in the aftermath of the great financial crisis, banks and other financial services companies did very well through the pandemic (after a brief, but significant downturn). Accordingly, Congress has not spent much of its scarce time focusing on financial services. Coming attractions - we expect to see movement from the SEC on climate change disclosure for registered advisers and, potentially, proposed rules on disclosure for governance, diversity and political giving.

Legislation would allow fintech lenders to participate in the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) flagship loan program by lifting a nearly four-decades old moratorium on issuing new Small Business Lending Company (SBLC) licenses.

The SBA’s new streamlined application portal will simplify forgiveness for millions of our smallest businesses — including many sole proprietors — who used funds from our Paycheck Protection Program loans to survive the pandemic.