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.
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As many as a dozen financial institutions are deploying IBM’s Watson to search for signs of employee misconduct so they can avoid a Wells Fargo-size scandal. But the legal and technical limits of its use are major issues.
October 16 -
The bank that can effectively enable a corporate customer to manage its working capital and order-to-pay cycle, pay its employees, and provide analytics and insights to forecast cash flow will win the lion’s share of profits, writes Jessica Cheney, vice president of strategic solutions for Bottomline Technologies.
October 16
Bottomline Technologies -
Third-quarter results from PNC, Bank of America, First Horizon and others suggest that demand for commercial loans may not be as weak as bankers and investors had feared. Or maybe some banks are just getting really good at poaching rivals’ customers.
October 13 -
Fee income also surged as the San Francisco bank reached the $100 billion mark in wealth management assets.
October 13 -
Overall net income rose 8% to $4.13 billion as cost control helped overcome shortcomings in global consumer banking profits and bond trading revenue.
October 12 -
An increase in corporate loans, the highest lending margin in four and a half years and record profit in asset management helped the lender top analysts’ estimates and offset trading and other challenges.
October 12 -
Bankers need to set aside their post-crisis aversion to risk, recapture some of the magic they once practiced as innovators, fear fintechs less, and worry about the Googles and Amazons more, says Peter Memon, a bank IT veteran turned global consultant.
October 11







