Commercial Banking

WASHINGTON—Many of Wall Street’s biggest banks are nearing agreements to pay as much as $200 million each and admit that their employees’ use of personal messaging apps such as WhatsApp violated regulatory requirements, according to people familiar with the matter. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plan to announce the deals with the banks by Sept. 30, the end of the government’s current fiscal year. That would put the penalties in the government’s annual enforcement…

House construction in the U.S. continued to slow in July, as high inflation and higher mortgage rates make it more expensive to build and buy property. Housing starts in July fell 9.6% from the month before to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.45 million, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, down from a revised 1.60 million the prior month. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected the government to report 1.52 million housing starts for July. The…

Allstate Corp. ALL -0.55% reported it swung to a $1.04 billion loss for the second quarter as inflation drove up costs to repair and replace automobiles and pay for injured people’s medical care.The company said it is accelerating efforts to raise premium rates to cover those expenses. Allstate’s results, released Wednesday, also were hurt by rising interest rates. The big car and home insurer incurred realized investment losses as it sold some older, lower-yielding…

Jeffrey Solomon is CEO of Cowen, an investment bank that is more than a century old. Photo: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg News…

For the past 18 months, the nation’s biggest bank has been assembling the pieces to launch a full-service travel business where customers can plan and book trips ranging from a simple domestic flight to an extravagant safari. It bought a booking system, a restaurant review company and a luxury travel agent. It is building its own airport lounges and a force of thousands of travel agents. A new website will launch in the coming months. Travel has become one of the most important spending categories for banks…

Two U.S. senators are preparing legislation that would give merchants power to process many Visa Inc. V -0.95% and Mastercard Inc. MA 0.58% credit cards over different networks. The bill, which could be introduced as soon as this week, aims to create more competition among U.S. credit-card networks, a sector where Visa and Mastercard have long dominated. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois…

As U.S. interest rates go up, money-market funds have been quicker to adjust than bank accounts, giving companies an incentive to shift their cash into those funds for higher returns.Companies accumulated record levels of cash during the pandemic and parked large amounts in bank accounts, where it usually generated little to no return. Low interest rates meant there was little reason to shift into money-market funds, a form of mutual fund that invests in short-term debt securities including Treasury bills and commercial…

Workers at HSBC HSBC 1.26% Holdings PLC’s Chinese securities subsidiary have formed a unit that represents the Communist Party, in the latest instance of the party establishing a presence inside a foreign company.As few as three workers have formed a party branch at HSBC Qianhai Securities, a Shenzhen-based investment bank owned by HSBC, people familiar with the matter said. London-based HSBC owns 90% of the company after increasing its stake this spring. HSBC said the…

The U.S. housing market is losing momentum after two red-hot years. Photo: Jeremy Erickson/Bloomberg News…

WASHINGTON—The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is preparing to prod banks to pay back more customers who are the victims of scams on Zelle and other money-transfer services, according to people familiar with the coming regulatory effort.Under new guidance the bureau is preparing to release in the coming weeks, banks could face heightened requirements around certain scams that have become more prevalent on these platforms, these people said, such as when a customer is tricked into sending money to a scammer pretending…