EMEA

The company has also hit its goal of having half of total loans tied to customers around Atlanta.

Blockchain's potential for revolutionizing the world’s payment systems has captured the imagination in recent years, and last month Santander became the U.K.'s first bank to use the technology to create a new international payments service.

Call it mutual respect. Bankers from mutually owned British building societies and similarly structured U.S. thrifts recently gathered in New England to address common challenges and share ideas about staying relevant at a time of rapid change in financial services. Here are the takeaways from their meetings.

Silicon Valley Bank expects to receive a banking license from Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority by the end of May and to open its first German location in Frankfurt in the coming weeks.

Despite Canada's high penetration of contactless POS terminals and consumer affinity for the technology, the country has lagged behind nations such as the U.K. and Singapore in contactless payments. That is set to change as Canada's transit schemes launch contactless open-payment systems.

The Supreme Court has sided with states in a dispute over sports gambling, a double victory for payment processors, which can use largely existing tools to serve an entirely new market.

State Bank popped up on the Houston company’s radar eight years ago, but management waited until now to strike.

Money launderers seem to be ramping up their use of a favorite strategy to clean their illegal funds — paying a small fee to a bank account holder to simply receive and send money transfers. And these so-called money mules are starting young.

Each year, 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the U.K. are forced under due to late payments. This is the net result of a culture where many large companies regularly make their suppliers wait far beyond agreed terms, before processing payment.

The Houston company had been an interested, but selective, acquirer before announcing this year's biggest bank deal.