Robert Barba

A Chilean bank's plan to keep the Miami bank intact is a better outcome for the market than a sale to an existing regional bidder, industry observers say.

Believe GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt when he says banks are unlikely to try to buy his consumer finance unit. Few banks could afford the huge business, and regulators would never allow them to buy it, market watchers say.

Private-equity groups are looking to cash out their bank holdings given the bullish stock market and bearish outlook for banking. But few will double their money like Warburg Pincus did with its investment in Webster Financial.

As investor Jay Sidhu and Atlantic Coast Financial intensify their fight over the Florida company's deal to sell to Bond Street Holdings, the market has priced a higher deal value into the stock. Atlantic Coast warns that no such bump-up is coming.

Brennan Ryan, a partner at Nelson Mullins, ran the equivalent of several marathons with his wife and a friend in the Marathon des Sables to raise money for Hemophilia of Georgia.

Capitol Bancorp is down three banks in the past week, but it could have been four. The company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday that regulators attempted to seize a fourth bank on Friday, but a temporary injunction from a state court stopped it.

Central Arizona Bank, a unit of Capitol Bancorp, was set to be shut down with two sister banks last Friday, but a legal challenge bought it a few extra days.

State regulators seized a third bank unit of Capitol Bancorp., $31.6 million-asset Central Arizona Bank in Scottsdale, Ariz, in a rare Tuesday failure.

Popular in Puerto Rico is selling another book of loans as part of its attack on credit problems. The multimillion-dollar hit from the sale will be offset by a gain from the IPO of a payments processor.

A court deadline this week and the failure of two of Capitol's banks last week have added to the Lansing, Mich., company's increasingly tense bankruptcy.

Regulators on Friday seized two banks owned by the $1.6 billion-asset company. The failures could tangle the Lansing, Mich., company in what the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. calls the cross-guarantee liability, meaning that the agency has the ability to charge Capitol's nine surviving banks with the cost of the failures.

A North Carolina bank that had belonged to the long-troubled Capitol Bancorp was closed by state regulators on Friday.

After a relatively busy April, the number of critically undercapitalized banks is down to just a handful. The pool of failure candidates could increase, but buyers should start looking elsewhere, industry observers say.

Independent Bank Group in McKinney, Texas, was already a busy buyer. Now with nearly $90 million of fresh equity and a valuable stock, the bank is looking to more than double its size over the next five years.

Other banks say small acquisitions take too much work, but Sterling Financial says a good, small deal is better than a risky, big one.

Customer satisfaction with BMO Harris fell after it bought Marshall & Ilsley thanks to a customer-service glitch and other issues, showing how hard it is to integrate acquisitions.

Patience is wearing thin among investors with banks' lack of prospects for producing returns, as a hedge fund official's call for the sale of American River in California shows.

High-profile investor Jay Sidhu says he still plans to vote against the sale of Atlantic Coast in Jacksonville even though Bond Street has agreed to pay shareholders $5 a share up front, instead of withholding $2 a share for a year to cover litigation costs.

Shareholders of Atlantic Coast Financial (ACFC) will no longer have to wait a year for 40% of their payout.

First Scottsdale Bank had $80 million in assets, but then it agreed to buy a $224 million-asset competitor and outbid five others to acquire a $45 million-asset bank from the FDIC.