Banking with Interest

The Senate voted last week to overturn the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s “true lender” rule establishing how and when national banks are considered the lender when a loan is sold. Hannah Lang and Brendan Pedersen, two reporters for American Banker, discuss the rule’s expected repeal and what it means for banks.

Ron Shevlin, managing director of fintech research at Cornerstone Advisors and a senior contributor for Forbes,  predicts what’s behind Walmart’s formation of a fintech. He also discusses why many banks are further behind on digital transformation than they think and how they can better improve their customers’ financial health.

Tony Repanich, a former community banker turned cannabis compliance expert, talks about the business opportunities available for banks—as well as the potential pitfalls. He also tackles the House’s recent passage of legislation to protect banks helping legal pot firms and its prospects in the Senate. 

Matthew Leising, a reporter for Bloomberg News, talks about his book “Out of the Ether,” which details a daring heist in which Internet thieves stole tens of millions of dollars worth of Ethereum. He talks about how they did it, the development of Ethereum as a cryptocurrency and what the heist says about its future.

John Ryan, the president and CEO of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, and Charlie Clark, the director of the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions, discuss state bank regulators’ new effort to retire the siloed state-by-state system of financial services oversight. The new system expands state regulators’ successful mortgage licensing system to cover the entire bank as well as nonbank companies.

Scott Sanborn, CEO of LendingClub, talks in-depth about why the prominent fintech opted to buy Radius Bank earlier this year and how that move is transforming the company. He also talks about how competition will heat up in the peer-to-peer lending space as the pandemic ends.

Dominic Ng, the chairman, president and CEO of East West Bank, talks about the evolution of his institution from a small thrift serving Chinese immigrants to a regional powerhouse with a key window into China. He offers advice on how the Biden administration should approach China, as well as his views on the disturbing rise in violence and discrimination against Asian Americans.

David Andolfatto, a senior vice president in the research division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, goes beyond the politics of the U.S. debt to tackle what it is, whether it’s a problem, and what steps policymakers should be taking now. Along the way, he challenges common assumptions about the debt level and the debate around it.

Several prominent fintechs, including Square, Varo Money, Lending Club and SoFi, have either chartered or bought banks recently. Kevin Wack, an award-winning reporter for American Banker, breaks down the different ways fintechs are trying to get into banking, how successful they are likely to be and why many bankers are so angry about it.

March 11, 2020, was the day that many Americans began to realize COVID was going to radically change their lives, as businesses transitioned to work from home and the U.S. stopped all travel to Europe. Several bankers had a front-row seat to the events of that day at a White House meeting with President Trump and his advisers. We talk with three participants—Rob Nichols, head of the American Bankers Association, Rebeca Romero Rainey, CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, and Richard Hunt, leader of the Consumer Bankers Association—to go behind the scenes about that meeting, what they would advise President Biden now and the impact COVID has had on the financial services industry.