BankThink

A new wave of artificial intelligence applications work by crunching financial data to answer customers' questions. This may give financial institutions a leg up over their nonbank competitors, since the latter group tends to lack vast reserves of people's financial information.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

All Politics Is Local: The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times both look at the draft legislation introduced on Tuesday by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to provide regulatory relief to financial institutions. American Banker stories provided an executive summary of Shelby's proposal and an analysis of how the political maneuvering will play out between Republicans and Democrats. The political game was the focus of one Journal story, with Democrats immediately expressing reservations...

While we've made progress in regulating banks, it's also necessary to ask whether we are making the most of an opportunity to ensure that the financial industry serves the best interests of society.

Most banks appear to be coping well with the CFPB's ability-to-repay rule for mortgages, but the burden is falling harder on community banks. A new proposal that would allow more small lenders to grant home loans to borrowers with high levels of debt could help.

Wall Street Journal

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., isn't running for president (as of yet) but her presence is certainly being felt in the C-suites of the largest banks. Seven executives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other banks met at Bank of America Tower in New York on March 31, or dialed into a conference call, to discuss how to counter the campaign-trail argument that banks are bad, according to unnamed sources and emails obtained by...