Finance

Mike Maguire will succeed Daryl Bible as the North Carolina bank's finance chief. Maguire has been in charge of Truist's consumer finance and payments businesses for nearly two years.

A shift is underway at the Federal Reserve in how to describe neutral — the interest rate level that neither stimulates nor restrains growth — as it debates how much higher to hike.

Flow Traders and Hudson River Trading have backed Sei Labs, a crypto startup founded by Goldman Sachs and Robinhood Markets veterans that is developing a blockchain aimed at speeding up decentralized finance transactions.

The pending deal will help keep the Canadian bank's funding costs low, since Bank of the West has a strong core deposit portfolio, executives said Tuesday. BMO is sticking with its year-end timeline for closing the acquisition.

The Federal Reserve's balance-sheet unwind is set to ramp up this week, which means the central bank will finally begin unloading the Treasury bills it started amassing almost three years ago.

The Canadian bank, which reported its quarterly earnings Thursday, recorded $22 million in charges related to its acquisition of First Horizon. Executives say they still expect the deal to close no later than January.

Net income at the Toronto-based bank dipped by double digits during the fiscal third quarter. But the company's U.S. operations, including City National Bank in Los Angeles, fared better.

The Canadian banking giant reported a 22% increase in loan balances, with the largest contribution coming from the United States. The surge in lending helped to compensate for weakness in debt and equity issuances.

Directors at two of the Federal Reserve's 12 regional branches favored a 100-basis-point increase in the discount rate in July, minutes of discount-rate meetings show.

U.S. central bankers offered divergent signals over the size of the next interest rate hike, with St. Louis's James Bullard urging another 75-basis-point move while Kansas City's Esther George struck a more cautious tone.