Dive Brief: The Federal Trade Commission on Dec. 22 announced that it decided to set aside a Biden-era order against Rytr LLC, a provider of an artificial intelligence-enabled writing tool. The abandoned order, issued in December 2024, settled allegations that Rytr’s service ...

Experian has announced that its full commercial credit data is now directly available inside the cloud-based Ascend analytics and decisioning platform, so lenders and other organisations can run analysis and build models on that data in one place. This is ...

Several changes in 2026 affect how debts can be collected in the U.S., but most are targeted updates (federal rate and fee adjustments, student-loan collection practices, and specific state laws) rather than a single sweeping new national debt collection law ...

The CFPB’s earned wage access (EWA) opinion does far less to reshape the market than headlines suggest, mainly because it doesn’t change the hard constraints that already drive how most EWA fintechs operate.​ Core reasons impact is limited The opinion ...

First Financial Bancorp has completed its all-stock acquisition of Chicago-based BankFinancial Corporation, with the deal closing on January 1, 2026.​ Key transaction details The transaction is an all-stock deal valued at approximately 140–142 million dollars.​ Each BankFinancial common share is ...

First Federal Bank has struck a deal to acquire the assets of Fidelity Bank’s mortgage division, NOLA Lending Group, expanding its retail footprint into Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Florida-based First Federal Bank, ...

To recap: Visa and Mastercard reached a new settlement with merchants to lower fees in the US this November—another attempt to end a roughly 20-year fight in the courts, per SEC filings. However, with merchants challenging the settlement from multiple ...

Danger Will Robinson! Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), has been hired by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general to lead a new blue-state consumer protection and affordability initiative targeting abusive business practices.​ ...

After five years of pandemic-era protections and a year of “on-ramp” transitions, the Department of Education is reactivating wage garnishment for millions of defaulted borrowers this January. The U.S. Department of Education’s resumption of Administrative Wage Garnishment for federal student ...