With numerous lawsuits on industry regulations and aggressive actions by regulators to issue rules before the end of the year, your ABA Banking Journal editorial team has had an incredibly busy year. Our team published 1,385 short Newsbytes stories (a 21% increase from 2023!), as well as numerous web and print features, to keep the industry informed. We also launched our flagship ABA Daily Newsbytes email on a new platform that deepened reader engagement with the Banking Journal. The result was a dramatic increase in our reader engagement numbers, with pageviews up 77% in 2024 compared to the year prior.
Presented here are the top 10 most-read items published on the Banking Journal website this year. Thank you for being loyal readers in 2024 — and feel free to let us know how we can better serve you in 2025 by emailing [email protected]. We wish you a happy new year!
— THE EDITORS
- Federal court blocks enforcement of beneficial ownership reporting rule. Late in 2024, small business owners and consumers began to pay attention to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s beneficial ownership information reporting rule, and there was intense interest when a court blocked it a few weeks before the reporting deadline. This Newsbytes story was our most-read item of the year.
- Top bank risks for 2024. A perennially popular topic, our overview of bank risk priorities for the year ahead (the January/February 2024 cover story by contributing editor John Hintze) was the most-read feature of the year.
- Seven cybersecurity threats for banks in 2024—and some smart precautions. Elizabeth Judd outlines several cyber threats bankers were paying attention to this year.
- Is it time to kill the paper check? Checks aren’t dying on their own. Meanwhile check fraud is up exponentially while bankers await a killer app for payments. This May/June 2024 cover story by Evan Sparks (along with a podcast) asked a foundation question that helped drive a conversation about new ways to crack down on check fraud.
- The 2024 compliance outlook. Carl Pry’s look ahead in ABA Risk and Compliance magazine was a popular read.
- Prepare your bank for the FDIC’s new signage rule. ABA intern Tanya Narwekar spotlighted key resources on how to comply in advance of a January deadline that was pushed to May 2025 at the last minute.
- Lessons learned from the initiative to combat redlining. Top fair lending attorneys Andrea Mitchell and Olivia Kelman summarized insights from federal redlining enforcement actions in an ABA Risk and Compliance cover story. (Mitchell also discussed these insights on a podcast.)
- The FDIC’s unusual loan from the Federal Reserve. Using publicly available data, ABA economist Jeff Huther found out that the FDIC turned to the Fed to finance losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund after the spring 2023 bank failures, even though other credit sources were available. Moreover, the loan that was made at penalty pricing, a decision that Huther estimates will cost banks an unnecessary $2.5 billion as they pay to recapitalize the DIF.
- Three key ways banks can drive core checking deposits. Kristopher Lazarretti of Deluxe explores ways that banks can win with small business checking products.
- The true cost of too much data. In an ABA DataBank post, ABA’s Dan Brown and Kitty Ryan shared results from an ABA survey showing that the cost for banks to comply with the final Section 1071 rule will be far higher than the CFPB projected, and the burden will disproportionately fall on smaller lenders and small businesses.
