View photosMore Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts politician and 2020 hopeful, on Tuesday pressed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on the regulator’s high percentage of approvals for bank mergers and acquisitions. How high? One-hundred percent. In a heated line of questioning in his testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, Warren noted that among the 3,819 applications for bank mergers received by the Fed since 2006, none were rejected. Asked if “zero sounds right,”...

A new report argues that U.S. bank CEOs are paid too handsomely for otherwise lackluster performances. Analysts from UK-based Aktis, a data platform that tracks bank governance, looked at compensation for bank CEOs at the largest European and American banks and concluded that European banks “seem to have aligned pay and performance more effectively” than their American counterparts. Aktis looked at 22 global systemically important banks (or G-SIBs) and measured CEO pay against their...

JPMorgan Chase’s new “cryptocurrency” is turning up the heat in the blockchain arms race among the largest U.S. banks and — at a higher level — the Federal Reserve. On February 14, JPMorgan Chase generated a lot of buzz by announcing “JPM Coin,” a digital coin that clients will use to move funds instantaneously. The “stablecoin” is linked to the U.S. dollar at a 1-to-1 rate, and can only be used internally by a “small number” of JPMorgan’s institutional clients, meaning the “cryptocurrency”...

The $66 billion deal to tie up southern bank giants BB&T and SunTrust could be the first domino to fall in a wave of M&A deals, as banks of all size race to build scale in an increasingly competitive space. On Thursday morning, BB&T (BBT) and SunTrust (STI) announced that they would be forming the sixth-largest bank in the United States by joining in a merger of equals, with BB&T shareholders owning about 57% of the pro-forma company and SunTrust shareholders owning about 43%. UBS analysts...

More One of the nation’s top bank regulators says the banking system is safe, but worries about risks at non-bank financial institutions, particularly mortgage servicers. The remarks from Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Jelena McWilliams come days after regulators freed the last “too big to fail” non-bank from extra regulation. Jelena McWilliams, chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, told a banking conference Tuesday that post-crisis regulatory reform helped make the...