BillMyParents announced Monday that it will soon be talking directly to its prepaid card users over the Web through a deal with RespondQ.

In what would be the first acquisition in its 50-year history, Peoples State Bank in Wausau, Wis., is planning to buy the $108 million-asset Marathon State Bank in nearby Marathon City for $5.6 million.

As Chris Larsen steps aside as Prosper's CEO, the company — and the rest of the peer-to-peer lending industry Larsen helped create — has the opportunity to change its course and possibly even merge with one of the very banks it originally sought to displace.

Crybaby bankers, when not engaged in weeping over new rules, focus on attacking "shadow banking," whether in the form of payday lending or money funds.

SHANGHAI (Dow Jones) - Citigroup Inc. said Monday it has sold its entire 2.71% equity stake in Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, which will result in an after-tax gain of approximately $349 million.

In her column, "It's Time for Money Funds to Fess Up About Fluctuating Values," Barbara Rehm seems too intent on promoting regulations "that could make money funds miserable," regardless of their impact on investors, the financial system, and the economy.

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Two leaders synonymous with Synovus, former CEOs James H. Blanchard and Richard E. Anthony, will not stand for re-election. Current CEO Kessel Stelling says the change will not sway its attitudes toward staying independent or selling itself.

During an appearance to business journalists, Cordray defended his agency's powers.

Morgan Keegan, the brokerage being sold to Raymond James Financial Corp., lost its bid to be dismissed from an $8 billion lawsuit by Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd.

Critics say branches are expensive and losing customers, but bankers this week rallied in defense of their brick-and-mortar locations, even as they acknowledged that branches are losing some ground to mobile and online banking.

Chimera Investment Corp., a publicly traded REIT that invests in MBS, said in a new SEC filing that it has fired its accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche LLP.

Fannie Mae this week reported "significant improvements" in the performance of several of its largest seller/servicers, even though only half received satisfactory reviews.

Mortgage bankers funded roughly $41 billion of jumbo loans in the fourth quarter, a 28% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to exclusive survey figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.

An appellate court has ruled that a borrower has the right to sue a servicer for violating the Home Affordable Modification Program, but a judge noted that the decision would have been helped by input from the Treasury Department.

The terms of the national mortgage settlement overlap to some extent with existing federal consent orders against the largest servicers, which could complicate banks' compliance efforts with both — and the role of the external settlement monitor.

Seacoast Commerce Bank in Chula Vista, Calif., will open its first loan-production office in Utah.

Community bankers are worried about stress tests, even though there is nothing in the Dodd-Frank Act requiring them to do it. While regulators are not requiring the tests for smaller banks, they are increasingly encouraging bankers conduct such tests.

In Barbara Rehm's column "It's Time for Money Funds to Fess Up About Fluctuating Values," she characterizes the $1 net asset value as "a fiction," which is defined at something feigned, invented or imagined.

Orrstown Financial Services Inc. in Shippensburg, Pa., said it expects to reach formal agreements with regulators that could require it to strengthen its credit risk management practices.