BNP Paribas Securities Services is working with crowdfunding specialists Lendosphere, Enerfip and Lumo to develop a distributed ledger (also known as blockchain) to register and record all transactions and changes of ownership related to 'minibonds'. The move follows the French government's initiative to encourage use of distributed ledger technology, rather than existing individual ledgers, to ensure the authentication of crowdfunding transactions. "Issuers and investors will benefit from a standardised process," BNP said. The bank aims to have the new platform ready by the end of this year, when changes to French law on minibonds take effect. Wells Fargo employees "appear to have found the soft underbelly of federal bank supervision" when they allegedly generated more than 1.5 million accounts resulting in the imposition of fees in excess of US$2 million on unsuspecting consumers, said US legal news service Law360. The actions were missed by federal regulators that should have been watching over the company because examiners would not typically look at such accounts, Law360 said. In related news, and as part of its investigation into Wells Fargo's actions the US House of Reps Financial Services Committee will be calling John Stumpf, the bank's Chairman and CEO, to testify at a hearing later this month. And while the bank may have agreed to pay $185 million over those customer accounts, affected customers have launched a class action. British consumers are nearly twice as likely to trust banks to keep their biometric information safe as they are to trust government agencies (at 60 per cent to 33 per cent), reports Finextra. A survey by Visa of around 2000 people found 85 per cent of respondents trusted banks to offer biometrics authentication as a service to confirm identity - up from 65 per cent in 2014. Payments networks are the next most trusted (81 per cent), ahead of global online brands (70 per cent) and smartphone companies (64 per cent). A quarter of 18-24 year olds are likely to switch banks if they don't offer biometric authentication. The Basel Committee, which sets global banking rules, wants to limit the capital benefits large banks get from sophisticated risk models, worried that these actions "create a level of accuracy and detail as seductive as it is fallible," reports the Wall Street Journal. This will disproportionately affect European banks versus US peers because Europeans have long designed their businesses around a risk-based approach to capital, while US banks historically were governed by simpler leverage ratios that use plain asset measures, the WSJ reports.