American Banker

Well, more details have come out since, and they're worth your time.

According to the government's order, as reported by American Banker, the bank built a computer system back in 2010 to decide which suspicious transactions a human being would actually look at.

And they built it partly because, in the government's words, there weren't enough investigators to work all the alerts.

Then, according to the order, the bank kept that system tuned in a way that spared its investigators and its budget.

But if that is something that the US government wants to change, that's a job for Congress, as best I understand it, not an executive order or perhaps a rulemaking, an APA rulemaking process.

What's funny about it is because this harkens back to when I was an American banker, I can remember there was a prominent New York Times columnist who made the argument that this was not long after the shooting at Newtown, which is obviously devastating.

And he was

making the argument that we were going to solve this problem by the banking system.

But there are also all sorts of UDAP type risks we saw, not just with Synapse in that sort of 2020 to 2023 timeframe, but marketing claim risks and certainly BSA, AML, money laundering risks.

And I think a lot of younger, maybe first time in financial services industry founders who are building sort of stablecoin native businesses, I don't think are aware or have learned the lessons that you reported on.

I reported on your former colleagues at American Banker reported on in that what I would consider a pretty painful period of three, four years where what close to 20, maybe more banks got consent orders related to third-party risk management, board governance, PSA AML, credit risk concentration, blah, blah, blah.

And so I think some people lived those problems, learned the lessons, and are trying not to repeat them.

So what does this all add up to? Kinova has ranked the bank's mobile banking number one for five years in a row.

An American banker just named Everyday Solutions the 2026 Innovation of the Year.

These recognitions reward improved experience as customers can see innovation and use.

The question most financial institutions will ask, though, who takes responsibility for getting a promising idea into the customer's hands? Raleigh says the bank's AI center of excellence came out of his group, and the handoff is made clear.

They were back up the next day.

U.S. banks have dodged early damage, too, per American Banker.

Here's how the world is fighting back.

Cloudflare switched on protection hours before the official fix came out, even for free users.

They were back up the next day.

U.S. banks have dodged early damage, too, per American Banker.

Here's how the world is fighting back.

Cloudflare switched on protection hours before the official fix came out, even for free users.

We have Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Synchrony, and BBVA have signed as design partners for Poppy, the personal agent protocol.

And this is according to American Banker in a story they ran on October 15th.

For those of you not familiar, Poppy is the open standard Sierra, Meta, Stripe, Walmart, Shopify, and Rocket announced on October 6th that lets a consumer's own AI agent work with a company through its site, its API, or an agent of its own.

The demo everyone's talking about is Rocket's VP of product asks Meta's Muse agent for a mortgage pre-approval.

It happens every single day.

who did the borrowing? Well, according to American Banker, commercial banks drove roughly 90% of that increase.

The New York Home Loan Bank, the one that serves this region where I sit, saw its advances climb 38% in six months to $127.7 billion.

Cincinnati was up 34% to $93.9 billion.

Cash walks out of checking and into money funds and T-bills.

Banks don't want to raise what they pay every depositor, so they pick up the phone and they borrow from the home loan bank instead.

The head of the Council of the Federal Home Loan Banks told American Banker the increase reflects, quote, the system acting as designed.

And honestly, my friends, He's not wrong.