Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are gradually increasing the guarantee fees they collect from lenders, and may discontinue the volume discounts they give large banks, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Ed DeMarco said on Monday.

The former Investors Savings Bank in Short Hills, N.J., has shortened its name to Investors Bank to better reflect its increasing commercial focus.

The White House proposed Monday to "modestly" increase the fees that mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge mortgage lenders as a way to reduce the U.S. mortgage system's dependence on government support.

WSFS Financial Corp. in Wilmington, Del., has hired Paul D. Geraghty as its chief wealth officer.

Atlantic Coast Financial Corp. in Jacksonville, Fla., said in a regulatory filing last week that Robert J. Larison Jr. is retiring as its chief operating officer.

BBVA Compass plans to take a small first step into South Florida this spring, by opening a branch in Miami.

Dynamics announced a chip card that can re-write itself and hold two different accounts. The new product is a chip-based variation of Dynamics' rewritable magnetic-stripe card, which lets users select an account by pressing a button built into the plastic card.

Profitability is under attack in the banking world today. Economic realities and the regulatory environment have forced banks to change how they do business.

HARRISBURG, Penn. – Pennsylvania State Employees CU plans to break ground later this month on a 239,000-square-foot headquarters building that will accommodate as many as 750 of the credit union giant’s employees.

Regulators, mortgage insurers, and plaintiffs' attorneys all failed to stop a decade-long pay-to-play scheme in captive mortgage reinsurance alleged by HUD's inspector general. But the short-term profits the deals produced may have cost banks a great deal in the long run.

It looks bad for fans of the higher loan limits for the government-sponsored enterprises, but that hasn't stopped housing, realty and mortgage trade groups from promoting the issue.

It would seem like a no-brainer for troubled European banks: sell their prized U.S. units to stateside rivals that are eager to grow. But conditions just aren't right.

Google Inc. will launch its mobile wallet with MasterCard Inc. and Citigroup Inc. in "a couple of weeks," MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga said, but he cautioned that Americans will not regularly pay with their phones for years to come.

Reports filed by major issuers in mid-September - the first round of data since the debt ceiling standoff and since the Eurozone crisis boiled anew - were mixed, but showed no major fault lines.

Faulty mortgages and foreclosure abuses have cost the nation's five biggest home lenders at least $65.7 billion, according to a tally by Bloomberg News, and new claims may push the industrywide total to twice that amount.

Many successful banks prefer to sell primarily through branches. This includes some large ones, such as Wells Fargo, plus a great many community banks.

Happy Bancshares Inc. in Canyon, Texas, has agreed to acquire Signature Bancshares Inc. in Dallas.

"We should not be penalized because we were not on the favored list of institutions that were deemed 'too-big-to-fail,' " Mike Perry says in a public campaign rarely seen from an executive of a failed bank.

S1 confirmed Friday that its planned merger with Fundtech has been terminated. But S1's board still does not want the company to be bought by ACI Worldwide, which has made repeated hostile bids for S1 in recent weeks.

Fiserv will begin personalizing chip payment cards based on the EMV standard. These cards feature a micro-processing chip that stores cardholder data more securely than magnetic stripes do.