Before agreeing to sell itself to East West, the Houston company tried to connect with Chinese banks. Could other banks follow MetroCorp's lead?

The first new bank in three years recently cleared the hurdles necessary to open its doors. To do so, Bank of Bird-in-Hand's backers had to file 18 inches of paperwork, raising the question of whether regulators have become so strict that they'll encourage financial innovators to go elsewhere and leave community banks to languish.

The founding chairman of U.S. Century Bank in Miami will step down.

BBX Capital in Florida, which sold BankAtlantic to BB&T last year, has added Hoffman's Chocolates to its wide-ranging holdings.

Croghan Bancshares (CHBH) in Fremont, Ohio, has bought Indebancorp in Oak Harbor.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released preliminary research Thursday on the use of arbitration clauses in connection with consumer financial products and services.

Pacific Mercantile Bancorp (PMBC) in Costa Mesa, Calif., is getting out of the mortgage business to focus on business banking.

Walter Investment Management (WAC) has bought $30 billion of mortgage servicing rights from an unnamed bank.

Toronto-Dominion Bank surpassed Royal Bank of Canada as the country's largest lender by assets for the first time after a decade-long expansion in U.S. consumer lending.

There may well be too many banks in the United States. That’s a problem for stock investors and CEOs of publicly traded banks to address, not policymakers.

Buyers in Texas show little interest in strugglers like Omnibank in Houston, leaving the door open for a buyer like Bank of the Ozarks from Arkansas that knows how to acquire and fix broken banks.

Even before Dodd-Frank, federal regulations had grown exponentially. The sheer quantity of the regulations is bad enough, but the complexity often confuses banks and their customers and increases compliance costs.

The peer-to-peer lender, which has both threatened banks' traditional businesses and cultivated Wall Street ties, is now selling its loans to community banks and working with them to offer personal loans as a counter to big banks' dominance in credit cards.

EverBank Financial (EVER) in Jacksonville, Fla., has agreed to pay the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $48 million in connection with its purchase of the failed Bank of Florida in May 2010.

SunTrust Banks (STI) has agreed to sell RidgeWorth Capital Management, its asset management business, for $245 million.

MetroCorp (MCBI) in Houston hired a consultant to scout possible Chinese suitors before agreeing to sell to East West Bancorp (EWBC) in Los Angeles.

The San Mateo, Calif., company plans to launch a new online lending platform, a sign of increasing competition among consumer-debt-consolidation lenders.

OneMain Financial, which makes personal loans of up to $15,000, has been on the block since 2009. But Citi may be poised to overcome a key obstacle to its sale, an executive explains.

Apollo Bancshares in Miami, Fla., has agreed to buy First Bank of Miami in Coral Gables.

How to reconfigure retail-delivery networks to suit the next generation of customers was top of mind for bank CEOs Tuesday, even as news headlines dwell on new regulations and sluggish growth.