Everywhere you turn, prices are on the rise, making it challenging to afford essentials and other required items, like car insurance. Many drivers across the country are receiving auto insurance renewal notices with unexpectedly high increases. If you’re asking yourself, “Why did my car insurance rates go up?” you’re not alone. Learning why car insurance rates keep can better equip you to find cheaper prices. Car Insurance Rate Increases by Year Car insurance rates have steadily increased over the last four years, according to our analysis of national averages. The average auto insurance cost per year in 2024 was 33%…

Home insurance covers your house if it’s damaged or destroyed and you need to rebuild. You want to make sure you have enough replacement cost value coverage so that your insurance company would provide enough money to rebuild if your house is damaged by a fire or other problems covered by homeowners insurance. Your home insurance company can figure out your home’s replacement cost value. You can also use an online replacement cost estimator to see how much you may need in replacement cost value. What Is Replacement Cost Value? A home’s replacement cost is how much coverage you would…

Business operations are generally better engineered today than in the 20th century, with more activities automated for quality control, cost savings and efficiency. But some things haven’t changed: human beings are still involved and continue to be sources of variability and uncertainty in high-risk activities, including manufacturing, power generation, logistics and transportation. Three-Mile Island was exacerbated by human error, the failure to correctly interpret signals from their instruments. In 2004, a major liquefied natural gas plant explosion affected 2% of global production when ineffective shutdown processes failed to prevent a boiler explosion and an even larger secondary explosion. The 2019…

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The metric that keeps CMOs awake at night, CFOs grumbling about marketing spend, and CEOs demanding “more growth, faster!” Few metrics in the banking and fintech arena are as hard to reliably quantify as this one. Luckily, a new study from Fintel Connect, 2025 Cost Per Acquisition Benchmarking Guide for Financial Services, provides some much-needed reality checks. Let’s get real about why your acquisition costs might be too high—and how to fix them before your CEO starts asking uncomfortable questions. The Drivers of Customer Acquisition Cost Here’s what the benchmarking…

Imagine a world where financial transactions occur instantly, assets traverse the globe with seamless efficiency, and every investor, regardless of stature, gains unfettered access to markets with confidence in the identity of their counterparty, previously out of reach. This is not a distant fantasy but a rapidly emerging reality, spearheaded by the projection that $30 trillion worth of assets could be tokenized by 2030. Across the banking spectrum, behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank are paving the way with the tokenization of deposits. They are introducing proprietary stablecoins to fortify settlement processes and alleviate the complexities…

The world of financial services is always evolving, but recently there are signs of a seismic shift. At the heart of this transformation is the rise of cryptocurrencies. Digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a host of others – including stablecoins – have moved from the fringes of the financial system to the forefront, capturing the attention of investors, regulators, and, increasingly, traditional banks. As the cryptocurrency market continues to mature, one question that is becoming increasingly urgent to answer is whether banks in the United States should be permitted to own cryptocurrencies. If banks are to remain relevant in…

After next week’s Federal Reserve Board meeting, Fed head Jerome Powell will hold his customary press conference for reporters who cover this powerful institution. But there are fundamental questions that get to the guts of how the Fed operates and the assumptions it holds about money, which guide its decision-making, that don’t get asked. This episode of What’s Ahead reveals several of the key questions that should be asked. Follow me on Twitter. Send me a secure tip. Read the full article here

Bank executives are sounding the alarm about a weakening economy, and everyone should be taking them seriously. In the last few days, BNP Paribas, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have all announced either that the probability of a recession is rising or that they are downgrading American stocks from Overweight to Neutral. It is understandable that the stock market is a big focus, because we can easily see how the escalating trade war and layoffs are affecting stock prices on a second-by-second basis. Stock market indices are leading indicators of where investors presently think the economy is…

The world of financial services is always evolving, but recently there are signs of a seismic shift. At the heart of this transformation is the rise of cryptocurrencies. Digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a host of others – including stablecoins – have moved from the fringes of the financial system to the forefront, capturing the attention of investors, regulators, and, increasingly, traditional banks. As the cryptocurrency market continues to mature, one question that is becoming increasingly urgent to answer is whether banks in the United States should be permitted to own cryptocurrencies. If banks are to remain relevant in…

Buried in a footnote of a nearly five-year-old regulatory letter, IL 1170, the national banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), opened the door for national banks to participate in the cryptocurrency marketplace. The potential to modernize the financial services system and to provide a safe environment for customers to transact in cryptocurrency was never realized because the banking regulatory agencies under the Biden administration, while never retracting the letter, essentially refused to acknowledge the existence and validity of that official publication, IL 1170. Fast forward to March 7, 2025, and the OCC’s new publication, Interpretive…