Commercial Banking News, Strategy & Risk Analysis
American Banker's commercial banking coverage explores how banks serve middle-market and corporate clients, focusing on issues such as interest-rate volatility, regulatory pressure, and intensifying competition for deposits and credit relationships. This section focuses on balance-sheet strategy, commercial lending, treasury and cash management, risk governance, and the technologies reshaping relationship banking.
Learn how institutions are recalibrating growth expectations, managing credit exposure, and using payments and treasury capabilities to deepen client relationships while preserving profitability.
Commercial banking is under structural pressure from higher funding costs, uneven loan demand, and increased supervisory scrutiny. Banks are being forced to prioritize relationship depth, disciplined credit selection, and non-interest income generation rather than balance-sheet expansion alone.
-
The Texas attorney general’s office is seeking more information on Citigroup’s gun policies as the bank stages a comeback in the state’s municipal-bond market after a GOP law upended its public-finance business there last year.
January 26 -
Goldsmith, the grandson of City National Bank’s co-founder, is set to retire as its chairman. In an interview, he betrayed no regrets about the company’s sale to Royal Bank of Canada, which was propelled by a similar logic about the need for scale that drives many deals today.
January 26 -
The French bank and New York asset management firm will buy and hold inventory to meet clients’ future needs and track materials on a new software platform.
January 24 -
A few months ago bankers were more hopeful than confident about an end to depressed demand for business credit. Now CEOs at Huntington, Fifth Third, Mercantile Bank and other companies are touting strong fourth-quarter loan growth, burgeoning pipelines and local job creation as reasons for optimism.
January 23 -
Loans to car sellers plummeted earlier in the pandemic due to chip shortages that hampered vehicle production. But supply improvements since last fall have fueled the start of a rebound.
January 21 -
Fourth-quarter profits rose 10% at the Cleveland company as investment banking income hit a record and nonperforming loans plummeted. Executives say charge-offs will probably start rising in late 2022 but that fee income from capital markets transactions will keep growing.
January 20 -
The Buffalo, New York, bank is tweaking its loan mix and reducing some deposits in interest-bearing accounts. It says the moves should boost its net interest margin, which has declined in almost every quarter since the start of the pandemic.
January 20












