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Bank of America Corp. is in discussions to pay more than $800 million to settle allegations it pushed customers into signing up for extra credit card products, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The agreement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which could be announced in coming days, would mark the largest federal settlement with a credit card provider over so-called add-on products. It would be the agency's fifth such agreement with a credit-card provider over products such as identity-theft protection and debt cancellation in the event of a job loss. The CFPB, along with other agencies, has been cracking down on credit card companies for misleading consumers about the value of add-on products. Credit card companies marketed these products aggressively to consumers, saying that they would protect the cardholders from identity theft or cancel debt in the event of a job loss. Federal officials say the products provide little financial benefit to consumers and were often marketed in a deceptive manner.

MF Global Inc., the defunct brokerage once led by Jon Corzine, will begin final distributions to fully satisfy $6.7 billion in claims from former customers, starting tomorrow and lasting several weeks, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. “Checks are going in the mail that will make all public customers of MF Global Inc. 100 percent whole,” trustee James Giddens said yesterday. The repayment will satisfy claims of more than 26,000 securities and commodities customers. MF Global Holdings Ltd., the brokerage’s parent company, filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31, 2011, after a wrong-way $6.3 billion bet on bonds of some of Europe’s most indebted nations. More than $1.6 billion in customer funds that should have been segregated were missing. The company listed assets of $41 billion and debts of $39.7 billion.

Squeezed by falling revenue on deposit accounts, banks are turning to a familiar source of income: overdraft fees, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The median fee for withdrawing more from a checking account than a customer has on deposit increased to an estimated $30 in 2013 — a record — up from $29 in 2012 and $26 in 2009, based on a survey of 2,890 banks and credit unions by Moebs Services Inc., an economic-research firm in Lake Bluff, Ill. Banks' fee revenue from checking, savings and other deposit accounts has been sliding since several regulations took effect. The Federal Reserve in 2010 stopped banks from automatically charging customers overdraft fees on debit card and automated-teller-machine transactions. In addition, the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law included an amendment that went into effect in 2011 lowering a debit card fee large financial institutions charge merchants.

A key House Republican is "hopeful" that President Obama will work with Congress to reform parts of the Dodd-Frank law, The Hill reported yesterday. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), chairman of the Financial Services subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, said that the president doesn't have the "affinity" toward Dodd-Frank and is more willing to work on reforming aspects of it. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recently supported reforms to the law that was enacted to prevent against future banking crises in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. The House Financial Services Committee has passed a number of bills that would reform aspects of Dodd-Frank including the derivative rules and swaps provisions, among others.

U.S. agencies trying to ensure the financial system is strong enough to withstand another crisis have settled on one of the last pieces of their regulatory apparatus to limit the size of bank debt, Bloomberg News reported today. The decision on how to count bank assets used in an institution’s leverage ratio will be in line with an international standard. That would be welcomed by the eight largest U.S. banks since they could more easily meet new capital rules than they could under an earlier plan. Banking overseers have made it clear since the 2008 credit crunch that they would require firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. to hold more capital relative to what they borrow to make investments. U.S. agencies have already proposed a leverage ratio of 5 percent for bank holding companies and 6 percent for their banking units — higher than the 3 percent set by an international group of regulators. What has been less clear is how to count certain complex transactions as assets in calculating that ratio. U.S. regulators have now agreed to take the approach adopted in January by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

A dozen large investors filed a joint lawsuit against 12 banks for allegedly conspiring to rig global foreign-exchange prices, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The class-action lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York yesterday, was from a group of investors across the U.S. and Caribbean, including city and state pension plans. They accused the banks of communicating "with one another, including in chat rooms, via instant messages, and by emails, to carry out their conspiracy," and for rigging foreign-exchange rates as far back as January 2003, the lawsuit said.The banks sued were Bank of America Corp., Barclays PLC, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc., Credit Suisse AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., HSBC Holdings PLC, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and UBS AG.

The administrator of MF Global Holdings Ltd.'s bankruptcy plan on Friday sued the auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers for at least $1 billion over its advice on a $6.3 billion European sovereign debt investment that helped fuel the brokerage's rapid demise, Reuters reported on Friday. According to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, PwC committed professional malpractice by offering "flatly erroneous" advice concerning, and approval of, the off-balance-sheet accounting treatment for the debt by MF Global and its then-chief executive, Jon Corzine. The complaint said PwC knew that the investment would add significant risk to MF Global's already weak finances. It said that MF Global would not have taken on the exposure, which allowed it to book immediate revenue, had it received sound advice.

SAC Capital Advisors LP urged a federal judge to approve its record $1.8 billion insider-trading settlement with the government, saying the firm is “deeply remorseful” for the illegal acts of its employees, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. SAC lawyer Martin Klotz asked U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in a two-page letter yesterday to sign off on the agreement, which also calls for the firm to close its investment advisory business. A sentencing hearing before Swain is scheduled for April 10 in Manhattan. Four SAC units were indicted last year, accused of reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profit through insider trades by employees dating to 1999. Steven A. Cohen, the firm’s founder, faces an administrative action by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging he failed to supervise the hedge fund’s activities. Eight current or former SAC employees have been convicted of insider trading charges.

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to sell more than half of its remaining shares of Ally Financial Inc. as part of an initial public offering of the auto lender, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Treasury said yesterday that it intends to sell 95 million shares in its latest move to further wind down its ownership stake. Ally and Treasury said Thursday that the agency would offer the shares at $25 to $28 apiece. In total, the deal could raise $3.06 billion, Ally said. The Treasury, which currently owns 177.3 million shares of Ally, also granted underwriters the option to buy an additional 14.25 million shares. The move is another milestone for the Detroit-based company that teetered on the brink of collapse during the financial crisis, weighed down by losses and litigation tied to subprime mortgages. To keep Ally afloat, the Treasury provided $17.2 billion in rescue funds to the company through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. To date, the government has recouped about $15.3 billion of that amount.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s creditors are set to receive about $17.9 billion next month in the fifth such distribution since the company filed the biggest U.S. bankruptcy at the peak of the financial crisis, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The payout scheduled for April 3 will include about $11.7 billion on third-party claims and $1.1 billion for recently allowed claims that would have been paid by earlier distributions, lawyers for the defunct investment bank said today in a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. A sixth payout is expected around Sept. 30, Lehman said. Lehman’s estate has already paid out more than $56 billion to third-party creditors — a figure that’s expected to reach at least $80.6 billion before the case is resolved, court records show. That estimate, made public in July, is an increase over the $65-billion recovery projected in the company’s liquidation plan approved in December 2011.