Mercury Technologies said today it applied for a national bank charter and federal deposit insurance, a move that would allow the fintech to operate as a regulated bank and expand its product offerings under direct federal oversight. The San Francisco-based Mercury said it submitted an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a […]
Google warns staff with US visas against international travel due to embassy delays, Business Insider says
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If you’ve been enjoying the golden age of high-interest savings, consider this your final boarding call. The Federal Reserve concluded its final meeting of 2025 on Dec. 10 with another 0.25% rate cut, bringing the target range down to 3.5% to 3.75%. This marks the third cut of the year, and banks are already beginning to slash their own rates in response. While the Fed does not directly set…
Federal lawmakers and the Department of Education were active this week, advancing proposals that could reshape how students understand college costs, borrow for graduate programs, and access student loan forgiveness. From new financial aid disclosure bills to continued student loan processing delays, these developments carry real consequences for students and families planning for college or managing debt.
Here’s a quick look at the most important stories shaping higher education and student finances this week for December 19, 2025.
The College Financial Aid Clarity Act (H.R. 6502) was introduced in the House this week, aiming to improve how colleges communicate financial aid eligibility and expected costs to students before enrollment. The bill would require institutions to use a federally designed financial aid award letter – which would be a vast improvement of the myriad of financial aid award letters currently being used.
Supporters argue that current award letters often obscure true costs, making it harder for families to compare offers or understand borrowing needs. Here’s our guide on how to read a financial aid award, so you can see how confusing it can be.
➡️ Impact: Clearer financial aid award disclosures could reduce borrowing surprises and help families avoid committing to colleges they cannot realistically afford.
A companion bill, the Student Financial Clarity Act of 2025 (H.R. 6498), would create a centralized universal federal net price calculator. Like existing net price calculators, it would show students their estimated total cost of attendance, net price after aid, and expected debt at graduation.
Lawmakers backing the bill say inconsistent formats and vague terminology have left students confused about what college will truly cost.
However, there are concerns about the massive amount of data required to be collected and how this would actually work in practice.
➡️ Impact: If enacted, families could more easily compare colleges on price and debt outcomes, rather than relying on sticker prices or confusing award letters.
More than 100 members of Congress sent a bipartisan letter (PDF File) urging the Department of Education to reconsider draft guidelines that exclude graduate nursing programs from the list of “professional” degrees eligible for higher federal loan limits.
Under the department’s current approach, many advanced nursing students would face lower lifetime borrowing caps than students in law or medical programs. Lawmakers argue this could limit access to nursing education and worsen workforce shortages.
You can see the full breakdown on graduate vs. professional degrees.
➡️ Impact: Borrowing limits directly affect who can afford advanced nursing degrees, particularly students without family financial support.
A newly filed Student Loan Status Report shows that the backlog of income-driven repayment (IDR) applications remains near 800,000, despite some improvement following the federal shutdown. The report indicates ongoing delays for borrowers seeking IDR enrollment and PSLF buyback processing.
Many borrowers are still waiting months for decisions that affect monthly payments and forgiveness timelines.
➡️ Impact: Processing delays leave borrowers in limbo, facing incorrect payments or stalled progress toward forgiveness.
I already compiled and posted my annual list of 2026 mortgage rate predictions.
But one more mortgage rate prediction just dropped, and it’s a doozy.
Yes, I’m being mostly facetious, but I still have to report it and let you digest it as you will.
It came during President Trump’s speech last night, where he briefly touched upon housing affordability.
Namely that it has improved during his first year in office, slowly restoring the American Dream in the process.
During a speech at the White House Wednesday evening, President Trump brought up a lot of things.
But the only thing pertinent to this post was his brief remarks about the housing market and mortgage rates.
He said, “The yearly cost of a typical new mortgage increased by $15,000 under Democrat rule. In 11 months. We’ve already gotten that annual cost down by $3,000 and it’s coming down a lot lower.”
This in reference to the 30-year fixed averaging around 7.25% in January versus about 6.25% today.
Adding that, “Wait until you see, the numbers are going to be shocking.”
He did the usual comparison to mortgage rates under Joe Biden, where they eventually skyrocketed late in his term due to the end of the Fed’s massive MBS buying spree known as QE.
Of course, Joe was also in office when mortgage rates hit record lows in 2021.
Anyway, forgetting the past and their ongoing rivalry, the part that stood out was Trump saying mortgage rates are going to come down a lot more.
And not just eventually, but “early in the new year.”
The irony is that for the 30-year fixed to improve markedly anytime soon, we’ll need more bad economic data.
Likely driven by a worsening labor picture with a higher rate of unemployment and jobless claims.
In other words, careful what you wish for when you’re promising materially lower mortgage rates in a short amount of time, but conveying the message that the economy remains strong.
We could potentially see mortgage rates improve for other reasons though, such as continued improvement in inflation readings, or more MBS buying from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which would help with spreads.
There’s also the thought of a new Fed chair being nominated, though that will happen later in the year when Powell’s term ends in May.
To that end, Trump said, “I’ll soon announce our next chairman of the Federal Reserve, someone who believes in lower interest rates by a lot.”
Most understand that the Fed doesn’t control mortgage rates, largely because they only focus on short-term overnight lending rates.
And mortgage rates are the exact opposite, very long rates such as the 30-year fixed mortgage.
However, there can be some correlation as Fed expectations can drive long rates, such as 10-year bond yields, lower.
But that only tends to happen if the underlying economic data warrants a drop in bond yields, typically because of cooler economic conditions.
So ultimately the Fed is simply reacting the news we already know and not the one actually pulling the strings.
If Trump has bigger plans, such as another round of QE that involves mortgage-backed securities (MBS, that’s a different story.
However, it seems very unlikely that’s the case so it’s best to ignore this stuff and continue to focus on the data.
I do give him a tiny little bit of credit for staying on message though and continuing to promise a glorious return to low mortgage rates, something he heavily campaigned on.
The good news is politics aside, the 30-year fixed is expected to dip into the 5s in 2026, even without direct intervention or a friendlier Fed.
Read on: How are mortgage rates determined?
Sutherland and ComplyAdvantage have united to develop an AI-driven financial crime management solution designed to help banks and fintechs respond to the rapid rise of AI-designed fraud, complex AML risks, fast-evolving financial crime threats, and complex compliance requirements.
Today, financial crime requires sophisticated, AI-intelligence-based solutions, as traditional risk and compliance controls cannot keep up. The Sutherland-ComplyAdvantage solution transforms financial crime management by delivering a single AI-native intelligence layer that continuously enhances screening, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, case investigations, and regulatory reporting. This solution delivers consistent compliance, which is scalable and balances compliance and customer experience.
“Financial crime today behaves like an intelligent, adaptive network,” said Banwari Agarwal, CEO of banking and financial services at Sutherland. “This partnership brings together AI, advanced analytics, and real-time intelligence to strengthen screening, monitoring, investigations, and operations. Our customers can now detect risk earlier, act faster, and operate with far greater accuracy and compliance.”
“The true hurdle in financial crime isn’t piling on more tools—it’s architecting systems that scale seamlessly and intelligently,” said Doug Gilbert, CIO and chief digital officer at Sutherland. “Through this partnership, we’re delivering a unified AI intelligence layer that spans data, models, and operations, empowering banks and fintechs to evolve their compliance programs with precision, speed, and zero added friction.”
The solution combines Sutherland’s 2,400-plus financial crime experts, AI-native digital accelerators, including Agentic AI, Sentinel AI, ID Scan, and HelpTree GenAI, and ComplyAdvantage’s Mesh, an AI-native platform that unifies customer and company screening, customer risk scoring, transaction monitoring, and real-time payments analysis in one intelligent system. Built on large language and predictive machine learning models, Mesh leverages agentic AI to learn, act, and adapt across the full compliance lifecycle.
The joint solution creates a unified intelligence layer. This allows financial institutions to:
Detect converging threats: Identify complex patterns that span both fraud and money laundering.
Respond in real-time: Move from reactive case management to immediate threat mitigation.
Unify the lifecycle: Monitor and respond to risk throughout the customer lifecycle, from onboarding to daily transactions, without data handoffs.
“The convergence of fraud, AML, and risk is the critical path forward for modern financial institutions,” said Vatsa Narasimha, CEO at ComplyAdvantage. “By bringing together our real-time risk intelligence and Sutherland’s digital transformation capabilities, we are empowering leaders to build FinCrime programs that are not just compliant, but actively resilient against the speed of new threats.”
Early enterprise deployments of the integrated solution have demonstrated tangible operational improvements, including:
The Justice Department’s extensive redactions to the Jeffrey Epstein files on Friday don’t comply with the law that Congress passed last month mandating their disclosure, according to Rep. Ro Khanna.
The California Democrat and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., led the effort on the legislation, which required that the DOJ put out its entire trove of documents by today.
But he blasted the document dump and singled out one file from a New York grand jury where all 119 pages were blacked out.
“This despite a federal judge ordering them to release that document,” Khanna said in a video posted on X. “And our law requires them to explain redactions. There’s not a single explanation. That entire document was redacted. We have not seen the draft indictment that implicates other rich and powerful men who were on Epstein’s rape island who either watched the abuse of young girls or participated in the abuse of young girls in the sex trafficking.”
He said Attorney General Pam Bondi has been “obfuscating for months” and called the files on Friday “an incomplete release with too many redactions.”
The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a separate X post, Massie agreed with Khanna, saying the DOJ “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law” that President Donald Trump signed last month.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.
Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.
“Thomas Massie and are exploring all options,” Khanna warned. “It can be the impeachment of people at Justice, inherent contempt, or referring for prosecution those who are obstructing justice. We will work with the survivors to demand the full release of these files.”
Capital One, JPMorganChase and Bank of America are responsible for 75% of all AI-related patent filings since 2023. What’s more, U.S.-based banks are outpacing global peers when it comes to AI patent filings and are responsible for 85% of AI related patent filings through 2023, according to a recent report from think tank Evident AI, which tracked 1,516 patents filed by 21 banks since 2023. While patents are not required to be made public by […]
This week, a new report from economist Will Page revealed that the global value of music copyright reached an all-time high of $47.2 billion in 2024.
Meanwhile, YouTube announced it will stop providing data to Billboard‘s US charts after more than a decade, following changes to Billboard’s streaming methodology.
Elsewhere, HYBE made a push into Africa via a new partnership with Tyla’s managers Brandon Hixon and Colin Gayle.
Also this week, The Weeknd closed a reported $1 billion catalog deal with Lyric Capital while maintaining creative control.
Additionally, MBW broke the news that Universal Music Group proposed divesting Curve to address European Commission competition concerns over its $775 million acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings.
Here are some of the biggest headlines from the past few days…
The global value of music copyright (both recordings and compositions) reached a new all-time high of $47.2 billion in 2024.
That’s according to a new report from Will Page, the former Chief Economist at both Spotify and UK collection society PRS for Music, published on Page’s website, Pivotal Economics.
The 2024 figure was up just $2.3 billion (5.2%) on the prior year. According to the report, “growth is slowing largely because this is the first year where the pandemic effects have vanished”… (MBW)
YouTube says it will soon stop providing data to Billboard for inclusion in the US charts, ending a partnership that has lasted more than a decade.
The decision, announced on Wednesday (December 17) by Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s Global Head of Music, comes just one day after Billboard revealed changes to its chart methodology that will actually narrow the weighting gap between paid and ad-supported streams.
Under Billboard’s current formula for the Billboard 200, one album ‘unit’ equals 1,250 paid/subscription streams or 3,750 ad-supported streams — a 1:3 ratio.
Billboard’s new methodology tightens that ratio to 1:2.5, with one album unit now equalling 1,000 paid streams or 2,500 ad-supported streams… (MBW)
South Korea-born entertainment giant HYBE has been rapidly growing its geographic footprint beyond its home market over the past few years.
First, it expanded into Japan, followed by the United States, and then Latin America in late 2023.
More recently, the company established operations in China (April 2025) and India (September 2025). Now, after expanding across Asia and the Americas, HYBE is making a push into Africa… (MBW)
The Weeknd has closed a deal with Lyric Capital Group that brings outside investment into his music catalog while keeping the artist and his team as shareholders with “creative control” over his catalog.
That’s according to a report from Variety over the weekend, which cited confirmation from representatives for the artist. The reported confirmation arrives less than four months after Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the Canadian singer is looking to raise roughly USD $1 billion in financing backed by his stake in publishing rights and master recordings.
The news outlet reported at the time that New York-based Lyric Capital was leading the talks and that the artist already reached out to other investors to assemble the financing package of up to $1 billion… (MBW)
Universal Music Group has proposed divesting Downtown’s Curve royalty accounting business to address European Commission competition concerns over its $775 million acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings.
UMG submitted formal commitments to the EC on December 11, outlining a plan to sell Curve Royalty Systems as a standalone business to an independent buyer approved by the Commission.
The EC sent out letters last week to potential buyers as part of the proposed divestment process. A document outlining the remedies package, seen by MBW, commits UMG to divesting the entire Curve business, including all employees (except two retained engineers), customer contracts, and the Curve Platform software and related assets... (MBW)
Partner message: MBW’s Weekly Round-up is supported by BMI, the global leader in performing rights management, dedicated to supporting songwriters, composers and publishers and championing the value of music. Find out more about BMI here. Music Business Worldwide
