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Sunwest Bank in Irvine, California, lets business customers open new checking accounts completely online, a technology challenge some large and regional financial institutions have yet to tackle.

The chief financial officer, Doug Fagan, will succeed Sundie Seefried, who is retiring.

Gripes against peer-to-peer payments services spiked during the past year as U.S. consumers flocked to Venmo, Cash App, Zelle and the like to transfer money.

Southern Bancorp, a community development financial institution, will devote part of a multimillion-dollar investment from the payments giant to developing technology that helps consumers budget, buy a home and more.

In buying the $1.5 billion-asset County Bancorp, Nicolet would become the second-largest bank in Wisconsin and the state’s No. 1 dairy lender. It's the second bank acquisition deal Nicolet has announced this quarter.

The fintech, which is going public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, has updated its logo and messaging to emphasize its capabilities in e-commerce and digital marketing. It's part of a trend of traditional payments such as TransferWise, Fattmerchant and even Mastercard repositioning themselves to win over investors.

Most credit unions don’t offer planning services, and affiliating with the No. 1 IBD could help CUNA Brokerage change that, the firm’s president says.

The huge buffers that banks built up over the pandemic are protecting the financial system from looming threats, regulators told President Biden during a meeting that also touched on climate change, extension of credit to the underserved and other topics.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued a proposal this month laying out how banks should treat cryptocurrencies held on their balance sheets. It could give stablecoins, which are tied to traditional assets, an edge over more volatile digital assets like Bitcoin.

Distributed ledger projects in banking are few and far between — many have stalled and others remain experiments. Robert Townsend, who has worked with banks around the world and written a book about blockchain technology, explains some of the ways financial institutions could be using it, for instance in small-business lending and supply chain finance.