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Banks Should Embrace These 5 Parental Leave Policies

11/03/16

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without mandated paid parental leave, but innovative leave policies are an opportunity to attract and retain employees in a highly competitive industry.

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Morning Scan: Marketplace Lenders Look to Mom and Pop; Going Digital

11/03/16

Wall Street Journal

Seeking retail: Marketplace lenders, rebuffed by institutional investors who stopped buying their loans, are hoping retail investors will provide a more permanent source of capital. Several new funds allow retail investors to buy into the business. Investors are attracted by loans that yield over 6%. But there's a catch, warns the Wall Street Journal: "They might find themselves locked into loans due to the illiquid structure of these funds, even as they shoulder...

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Morning Scan: Wells Settles; Silicon Valley Seeks Gold in New Jersey

11/02/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Another hit: Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in which it was accused of overcharging homeowners for appraisals ordered after the borrowers defaulted on their mortgages. The plaintiffs allege they were charged $95 to $120 for a service that cost the bank $50 or less. Under the proposed settlement, Wells will mail checks, averaging $120 each, to more than 250,000 customers whose home loans were...

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Morning Scan: Competition for Bitcoin; Eying Visa, MasterCard

11/01/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Move over bitcoin: Speculators drove up the price of a single unit of Zcash – a new virtual currency that was built to be all but untraceable – to over $1,000 on Monday, a few days after it was introduced. The online currency, developed by scientists at Johns Hopkins and MIT, uses advanced cryptography that enables Zcash "to be sent around the world essentially without a trace, unlike Bitcoin." Price volatility aside,...

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Morning Scan: SoFi Expands Products; Goldman Softens Policy

10/31/16

Wall Street Journal SoFi selling insurance: Marketplace lender SoFi, which got its start in 2011 refinancing student loans and has since expanded into mortgages and other financial products, is now gearing up to sell life insurance. The San Francisco-based company obtained a license in its home state in September to sell insurance on behalf of Protective Life Insurance, a Japanese-owned company that had $767 billion of insurance in force at the end of last year. SoFiÂ...

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Morning Scan: No Update on Deutsche Negotiations; Chatbots Coming

10/28/16

Breaking News This Morning ...

UBS profits fall: Unlike other large international banks, which have mostly been reporting better-than-expected earnings for the third quarter, UBS reported its net profit dropped more than 60%. Net profit fell to 827 million Swiss francs from 2.1 billion francs in the same quarter last year. Analysts were expecting 945 million francs. Last year's figure was inflated by a large one-time tax benefit. The Swiss bank said it continued to experience...

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Women in Banking: Qualities for Success; Equity on the Small Screen

10/27/16

A report on women in the financial services industry illuminates some of the ways gender is still a factor holding them back. One problem is unstated ideas about qualities for success, which have been decided over decades by men. It seems that gender diversity initiatives aren't helping, but a couple of headhunters have some suggestions for how banks can do better and so does Debbie Matz. "Equity" screenwriter Amy Fox talks about what she learned from women on Wall Street, and the film is set to become the basis of a new ABC television series.

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No Hollywood Ending for Women on Wall Street

10/27/16

The last movie about female executives on Wall Street was "Working Girl" in 1983. The end of the movie left the audience feeling euphoric. But in creating the movie "Equity," we set out to explore Â-- as authentically as possible Â-- the experiences women have in this field, and the truths that we encountered in our interviews were not pretty.

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Morning Scan: Deutsche Back to Black; Senate Dems Seek Banker Pay Rules

10/27/16

Breaking News This Morning ...

Deutsche Bank reports: Deutsche Bank reported a profit of €278 million in the third quarter, compared to a loss of €6.02 billion in the year earlier quarter. Analysts had been expecting another loss. The big German bank said it was making progress on turning around its business even as it seeks to negotiate a reduced penalty with the U.S. Justice Department to close a probe related to mortgage securities. Wall Street...

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Morning Scan: OCC Asks About Incentives; Wells CEO Apologizes

10/26/16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

OCC seeks data: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has sent formal letters to large and regional banks it regulates seeking information about their sales practices and incentive-compensation plans following the Wells Fargo scandal. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Santander USA were among the banks getting letters. Comptroller Thomas Curry told the Senate Banking Committee last month the regulator will "review the sales practices of all the large...

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