After a California woman spent more than a decade obtaining reparations for Nazi plundering of her family's belongings, the money disappeared from her bank account. Her saga highlights a gap in fraud cases between what consumers expect from their banks and what those banks are in a position to deliver.

Consumer debt aggregators such as Method, Payitoff, Spinwheel and Tally are partnering with financial institutions to embed solutions that aggregate account information and devise ways to optimize repayment — including with low-interest offers from the bank itself.

Bank stocks are up this year as interest rates have leveled off and there are hopes that pressure on lenders' profits could moderate.

There is fundamental work involved in laying a modern data foundation and adopting a flexible, data-driven, cloud-based IT architecture suitable for AI implementation. Most banks aren't there yet.

As the Federal Housing Finance Agency considers revising Federal Home Loan bank membership standards, it should consider the benefits of scale that large member banks make possible.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's overdraft proposal would set fees at $14. With fee income under attack from many sides, bankers say they would have to further restrict credit.

Big national retailers will capture all the financial benefits from proposed reductions in swipe fees, while consumers will be left with fewer benefits programs and less secure transactions.

A set of panels discussing minority depository institutions and digitization found that cost is a significant challenge to minority depository institutions, especially in the core processing space.

The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a 30-page guidebook on managing affiliate risks. The report builds on formal guidance issued last year.

In talks with OCC officials, "it became obvious that we would not gain near-term approval given their recent experience with multifamily and CRE positions," FirstSun CEO Neal Arnold says. The companies announced other revisions to their deal, too.

Former Silicon Valley Bank exec Floyd Kessler joins Comerica as executive vice president and chief business control officer; Melissa Holding succeeds Michael Robinson as head of wealth management at Huntington; Goldman Sachs' Alexander Mayer is set to take on a senior position at JPMorgan Chase; and more in this week's banking news roundup.

Banks maintain lists of consulting firms that they trust to help troubled commercial borrowers to fix their businesses. These specialists say they're getting more calls, especially in areas such as multifamily and CRE, from business owners who need help.

Texas Dow Employees Credit Union has agreed to acquire Sabine State Bank and Trust in Louisiana to raise its profile in the oil-and-gas industry. The deal coincides with record levels of U.S. drilling this year.

Consolidation has slowed since the pandemic, but UMB's agreement to buy Heartland Financial — the largest deal in three years — is one of several merger announcements in the past two weeks. Talks among other potential buyers and sellers are said to be picking up.

The Los Angeles-based company, which focuses on Korean Americans, said the acquisition of Territorial Bancorp will allow it to expand its customer base.

The first bank failure of 2024 will result in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based Fulton nearly doubling deposits in Philadelphia, a market it has viewed as strategically important for several years.

The combination of the two regional banks is set to create a $64.5 billion-asset company with a 13-state footprint across parts of the Midwest, South and West.

Isabel Casillas Guzman, administrator of the Small Business Administration, wants the agency to get involved in direct lending, a practice that was discontinued during the Clinton administration. Congress has not embraced the idea, to put it mildly.

Extensive partnerships with third-party service providers, fintechs and other partners are the banking equivalent of a supply chain, and bankers need to be clear-eyed about assessing the risk associated with them.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is arguing that Colorado has the right to establish an interest rate cap that all state-chartered banks must follow. Three industry groups are suing the state in an effort to stop its attempted crackdown.