Weekly Global News Wrap Up: European banks' battles continue; JPMorgan's physical branches vital to expansion

And BoA, Citigroup review policies allowing credit cards to buy bitcoin.

From Bloomberg: European banks may have scored a victory in having the Basel III capital standards toned down, but that doesn’t mean they can rest on their laurels. There are more battles to come in 2018, in particular lobbying lawmakers on a series of measures designed to reduce risk in the system. The regulations are deemed a vital step toward the banking union that the euro zone hopes will secure its future.

From Reuters: JPMorgan Chase & Co sees brick-and-mortar banking as essential to expanding into more than a dozen markets over five years, even though customers do 80 percent of their transactions online or at ATMs, a bank executive said on Tuesday. “Seventy-five percent of our deposit growth comes from customers who use our branches,” Thasunda Duckett, chief executive of Chase consumer banking said in an interview. “Customers still visit branches, on average, four times a quarter.”

From CNBC: Friction is increasing between some credit card companies and customers who want to use the cards to buy cryptocurrencies. Bank of America and Citigroup are reviewing policies that allow customers to buy bitcoin with credit cards. The reviews follow news about two weeks ago that Capital One Financial has decided to prohibit cryptocurrency purchases.