Banking Blog

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article last week exploring the ID theft protection services banks offer to checking account customers: Citibank, Fifth Third, Wells Fargo and BofA say their products help protect customers from identity theft by detecting problems earlier—and that being enrolled in its services means faster recovery of a stolen identity.

Access to capital in the form of bank loans is crucial to the operation and expansion of many small businesses. While there’s no question that capital has been “crunched” in the Great Recession, the debate over whether small businesses can — or can’t — get bank loans today is apparently still open. The National Small

Americans love their smartphones: an average of 61.5 million Americans owned a smartphone in the final quarter of 2010, according to comScore. And although a lot of bank customers aren’t too crazy about banking on those smartphones yet, banks are continuing to push mobile banking for their checking accounts, savings accounts and other products. A new

“The biggest risk to banking today has become regulatory risk.” That’s a comment from Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president of the American Bankers Association in Washington, D.C., on the group’s ABA Dodd-Frank Tracker blog. Indeed, Abernathy may be right about the increased risk as a “tsunami of new rules and restrictions,” to use his description,

Last week I wrote a little bit about how a Dodd-Frank provision exempting small banks and credit unions from limits on debit fees would help credit unions keep offering free checking accounts and debit rewards while accountholders at big banks lose out. But Fred Becker, President and CEO of the National Association of Federal Credit

Some the largest U.S. banks are planning to pay fatter dividends to their shareholders this year. That’s according to “Big banks gearing up to restore dividends,” a Jan. 16 news story by Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash in The Boston Globe. Here are some data points, in part from the story: $70 billion. That’s

Banks and their customers don’t exactly see eye to eye when it comes to consumers’ attitudes about banks’ reputation and trustworthiness. That’s the key finding of one recent survey on the subject. The difference between consumers’ and bankers’ impressions was a matter of 44 points on the most recent biannual Index of Bank Sentiment, created

Looks like small banks and credit unions might be more likely to keep free checking accounts around than large banks, thanks to a loophole in last year’s Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The law caps debit interchange fees, the fees banks charge merchants to process debit card transactions, but only for banks with over $10 billion

Consumers may have a lot on their minds when they interact with their bank. After all, overdraft fees, free checking accounts and loan foreclosures are just a few of the controversial subjects that affect many banking customers in one way or another. But what do banks – or more correctly, bankers — think about? It’s an

“Decrease debt.” That was the top choice of consumers who responded to a recent online poll about finance-related New Year’s resolutions. The poll was conducted in December by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, or NFCC, a nonprofit based in Silver Spring, Md. The respondents, who numbered more than 3,200, were given four possibilities from