102 articles · Financial Services · page 4 of 6
Articles
Week of 17 October 2022
If the CFPB’s funding fell, the statutes would still stand
An appeals court’s 2022 ruling that the consumer bureau’s funding was unconstitutional put a question mark over every CFPB rule for eighteen months. The sensible response was sorting: past orders, current rules and pending rules each carried a different kind of risk.
Week of 26 September 2022
Recordkeeping fails where the approved channel is slower than a text
In 2022 regulators fined major Wall Street firms over business texts sent from personal phones. The rules were old and the tools existed. People simply chose the faster channel, and fixing that took better apps, real supervision and proof that capture works.
Week of 19 September 2022
What a stolen license number proves, and what banks treated it as proving
The Optus breach put millions of driver’s license and passport numbers in criminals’ hands. Banks had treated those numbers as proof of identity when opening accounts, answering calls and keeping files. Each of those habits needed its own fix.
Week of 8 August 2022
Tornado Cash and the transfers nobody asked for
Treasury’s sanctions on Tornado Cash targeted software, not a person. Forbidden money could land in anyone’s wallet uninvited, the usual parties to screen did not exist, and the rule itself was soon under legal attack. Banks had to comply anyway.
Week of 4 July 2022
Rogers: the bank outage that started at someone else’s carrier
One Canadian carrier went dark for most of a day, and debit cards stopped working nationwide, even at banks that had never bought a Rogers line. Telecom dependency hides in places a two-carrier policy cannot reach.
Week of 9 May 2022
Stable is a claim: what TerraUSD asked of bank front lines
Few banks held TerraUSD, yet its collapse still walked through their doors with their customers: scammers preying on the losses, disputes over transfers people had approved themselves, and real confusion about which products near a deposit were actually protected.
Week of 25 April 2022
Why the CFPB’s dormant authority put fintech partners on the exam calendar
The CFPB dusted off a rarely used power to supervise nonbanks whose conduct puts consumers at risk, and exam readiness stopped being a problem for later. Fintechs had to build it before they scaled, and their sponsor banks had to check it.
Week of 18 April 2022
TraderTraitor aimed fake job offers at the engineers who hold the keys
In April 2022, a federal advisory described North Korean operators courting crypto-firm engineers with fake job offers and booby-trapped apps. For financial firms, a recruiter’s message reaches the people with the most access through a channel security rarely watches, so assume one will succeed.
Week of 28 February 2022
Russia’s sanctions tested banks’ ownership data more than their name lists
From late February 2022, sanctions on Russia arrived in fast waves, from several governments, against sprawling corporate groups. Checking names against lists caught the obvious cases. The real exposure hid in unnamed subsidiaries, changing dates and differing national rules: all data problems.
Week of 14 February 2022
In Ukraine’s bank DDoS, the rumor outran the outage
In February 2022, attackers knocked Ukrainian state banks offline for a few hours while fake texts claimed ATMs had failed. The outage was brief; the fear was the point. Staying available in a crisis includes what customers believe about their money.
Week of 7 February 2022
Bitfinex’s six-year trace ran through records that banks keep
Investigators followed bitcoin stolen in 2016 all the way to a $3.6 billion seizure in 2022, because the ledger never forgets. The decisive links sat at regulated firms, so banks need records of crypto-linked activity that still make sense years later.
Week of 29 November 2021
Inflation’s first casualty in bank IT was the change budget
Bank and credit union technology budgets took an inflation squeeze after the Fed dropped “transitory” in late November 2021. Running costs rose on their own through contracts, wages and usage pricing, and modernization money paid the difference.
Week of 8 November 2021
Robinhood’s phone-call breach argues for support access sized to one customer
In November 2021, one phone call to one support employee gave an attacker reach into millions of Robinhood customer records. The fix lives in three places: the person on the phone, the tools on their screen, and what customers are taught to trust.
Week of 25 October 2021
Non-bank lenders got bank-grade security rules and a named person to answer for them
In October 2021 the FTC gave mortgage brokers, auto dealers, finance companies and tax preparers specific, bank-style security rules. The bigger shift was who answers for them: one named person, a written report to the board, and proof the program works.
Week of 11 October 2021
FinCEN’s ransomware analysis turned well-written SARs into threat intelligence
In October 2021, FinCEN used banks’ suspicious activity reports to sketch the money trail behind ransomware. It worked only where filers had recorded details like wallet addresses clearly. That same choice decides how useful the data is inside the bank.
Week of 20 September 2021
What sanctioning SUEX changed for banks that serve crypto firms
Treasury’s September 2021 sanctions on the crypto exchange SUEX went after the place where ransom money gets cashed out. Because SUEX hid inside other exchanges, banks serving crypto businesses had to decide how deep to look, and what that would cost.
Week of 9 August 2021
Who counts as a crypto broker mattered less than what brokers could not know
In August 2021, the Senate fought over who should count as a crypto “broker.” Banks and brokerages were clearly in. Their real problem was three kinds of data they did not have: what customers paid, where assets had been, and who sent them.
Week of 5 July 2021
Why community banks’ open banking experience sat with their core vendors
The July 2021 competition order nudged the CFPB toward a rule on sharing bank data. For community banks and credit unions, the customer’s experience of that sharing was already shaped elsewhere: by core and digital banking vendors, in three moments they only partly controlled.
Week of 21 June 2021
TransUnion won Ramirez, and name-only matching still lost
In June 2021 the Supreme Court narrowed who can sue over inaccurate credit file flags. Underneath was a matching failure that banks and fintechs share, and the ruling changed none of the three things that govern it.
Week of 14 June 2021
Juneteenth tested how many calendars a bank really runs
Juneteenth became a federal holiday with one day’s notice in June 2021. For banks and credit unions, it revealed something surprising: a “business day” is defined in three places, the payment rails, customer commitments and the workforce, usually owned by three different teams.