BMO Harris Bank in Chicago recently became the first financial institution to offer a Mastercard that allows transgender and nonbinary people to use their preferred names. Members of that community often experience disproportionate financial hardship, in part because of employment discrimination.
The Cleveland Fed president dismissed concerns about the central bank's faster payments system competing with The Clearing House's network, while saying that a national digital currency is less of a necessity in the U.S. than in other countries.
If the deployment of faster payments came with a guarantee to boost a financial institution's bottom line, more banks and businesses would likely invest in bringing their legacy systems into a new age.
The online platform lender Kabbage is making the move beyond just providing working capital loans to small businesses, putting it in direct competition with alternative acquirers and payment companies.
Renaud Laplanche, one of the first fintech disruptors, is launching an unusual type of credit product at Upgrade, his new company, that is a cross between a credit card and an unsecured loan.
In the payments world, Scharf is best known as the CEO of Visa Inc. from 2012 to 2016, where his strategies for faster payments, fintech partnerships and other key issues may shed light on what Scharf has planned when he becomes CEO of Wells Fargo.
