Lerer Ventures Managing Director Eric Hippeau and Bloomberg’s Max Abelson discuss banker startups on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Makers.”

See video at Bloomberg Business Week

by Thomas Reese

Pope Francis continues to move ahead with his reform of the Curia by appointing Cardinal George Pell of Sydney as a financial watchdog in the Vatican. His title will be cardinal prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, a new office that will “undertake the economic audit and supervision” of offices of the Roman Curia…

Read more at National Catholic Reporter

Religion News Service  | by  David Gibson

VATICAN CITY (RNS) High-level debates over Catholic teachings on marriage and divorce and other hot-button issues heated up on Wednesday (Feb. 19) as a highly anticipated effort to overhaul the Vatican bureaucracy slogged through the devilish details of financial reform.

Read more at Huffington Post

By Phil DeMuth

Mindy Rosenthal of the Institute for Private Investors has been interviewing young ultra-high-net worth investors.  These individuals, most of whose families are worth over $100 million, do not respond to surveys or questionnaires; you have to know someone to get to them.  That makes her data set uniquely valuable.  One disruptive juggernaut lurking within it is the attitude of the young and the ultra-affluent (could that be the title of a soap opera?) toward charity.

While their parents were happy to write elephantine checks to the “American Big Disease Association” or the “Big City Cultural Institution” or “Ye Olde Ivy College Foundation” or the “Mainline Church Denomination”, the kids (and by kids here I mean from age 18 through their 30s) have little interest in outfits like these.

Read more on Forbes

Column By TED SCHWARTZ

As the bull market roared in the 1990s and fortunes were made (and lost in the tech-stock crash of 2000), there came into vogue among some investors a practice known as socially responsible investing, or SRI.

Read more at ABC News

The Washington Post reports on Pope Francis’ new appointments to the advisers for the Vatican Bank, retaining only one of the previously appointed Cardinals. From WaPo:

In 2012, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was ousted as bank president after being accused of incompetence.

That same year, U.S. banker JPMorgan closed its accounts with the bank, and Deutsche Bank Italia ended a 15-year relationship, making the Holy See a cash-only state for several months.

[Pope Francis Shakes Up Vatican Bank] – Washington Post

By Catholic News Agency’s Vatican Observer, Andrea Gagliarducci

Earlier this week reports of a potential new president of the “Vatican bank” were leaked to Italian media, suggesting the possibility of a greater Italian influence in Vatican finances.

Read more at the Catholic News Agency

By Tom Scheck, Minnesota Public Radio

The Rev. Stanley Kozlak served nearly three decades in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. But then he fathered a child and the archdiocese needed him gone.

Removing Kozlak quietly wouldn’t be cheap…

Read more at MPR News

Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, a prominent German cardinal defended Pope Francis’s comments about the economy in his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [The Joy of the Gospel].

Read more at CatholicCulture.org

By Eleanor Bloxham, CEO of The Value Alliance

Board diversity, executive pay, transparency on political contributions, and human rights improvements are all on the agenda for shareholders this proxy season.

Read More at CNN Money