If it walks like a duck...  Here's a simple question most five year olds can answer: "What is a bank?"  It seems simple, but can you answer it?  Yes, it's pretty obvious if a company has the word "bank" in its name, but what about folks like PayPal and Square, and, and, and...?  Are they banks?  Does it matter?  It turns out that it matters a lot — at least to quite a few government folks.  The problem is that in our modern world of online financial services — referred to as "fintech" — defining a bank has a special set of problems.  Mired in archaic notions of what constitutes banking, a fierce battle is being waged not only to define a bank, but to regulate all who dare look like any part of the historical image of a bank. A few years ago, the comptroller of the currency was worried about the ever-expanding role that fintechs were...(Read Full Post)