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American Express has purchased Sometrics, a company that facilitates payments within electronic games using virtual currency, in a deal worth $30 million, the company confirmed Tuesday.

Wintrust Financial in Illinois is tired of hiding behind numerous brand names. The $15 billion-asset company has launched an advertising campaign to aggressively introduce the Wintrust brand in Chicago.

An ideological divide in the party has prevented a resolution to the GSE problem, the West Virginia Republican said. More help will be needed from the White House, too, she said.

The Florida appeals court ruling could make it harder for mortgage servicers to use such records as evidence for foreclosure without verifying the underlying information.

The biggest bank in Hawaii is set to have a new chief executive.

Series of bad events led to Seattle banks sale to AmericanWest. Being small did not help things.

Forget Dodd-Frank. Never mind unemployment. Want to jumpstart lending? Fix the system for classifying loans, Harris Simmons says.

Create a national charter for nonbanks so they don't have to go through banks to offer products to underserved consumers.

A group of bankers have banded together to buy First National Bank of Chillicothe in Texas and will use it to open a branch just outside of Dallas.

Big bank deals will worsen systemic risks and unfair competition, said the ICBA, which called for a moratorium while new regulations are in the works. Capital One argued the deal would create a safer company.

The Massachusetts Democrat said housing advocates' fight against a key reform of Dodd-Frank would hurt the low-income borrowers they are trying to help.

Smaller banks have systems work to do, and a company called WebEquity is trying to fill in the niche. Upgrading to a unified system helps prevent inadvertent discrimination and stop making lending decisions based on excel spreadsheets.

Calvin B. Taylor Bankshares Inc. in Berlin, Md., disclosed that its board has reinstated a stock repurchase program that had been dormant for nearly two years.

A group representing community banks Tuesday urged federal regulators to impose a moratorium on all acquisitions and mergers involving large financial firms--including Capital One Financial Corp.'s pending plan to buy ING Direct USA.

Bank of America is pushing some of its brokerage clients who want to keep their debit rewards to switch to credit cards following U.S. caps on debit card transaction fees.

Dodd-Frank failed to cure key structural shortcomings of mortgage servicing that are still harming consumers, says Raj Date, the interim leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

At a community banking panel at this year's American Banker Regulatory Symposium, the consensus held that regulation can't be a one-size-fits-all practice.

Capital One Financial Corp. Tuesday will announce plans to invest $180 billion over 10 years in low and moderate-income communities if its deal to acquire online banking business ING Direct USA goes through as planned, part of an effort to ease community groups' opposition to the deal.

The Federal Reserve is holding public hearings in three cities across the country to review Capital One's proposed purchase of ING Direct. The hearings to be held in San Francisco are half a continent away from the nearest branches of what may become America's fifth largest bank. Without branches, the bank's responsibility to California cities and counties is not clear under regulators' current interpretation of the federal Community Reinvestment Act.