After nearly two years of sputtering commercial loan growth, regional bankers are counting heavily on expanding their portfolios of personal loans and other types of consumer credit.
The online giant has succeeded in disrupting every area of retail, but in banking it faces a high barrier to entry and fierce determination from banks like Citizens Financial and Bank of the West to keep upping their games.
It’s not necessarily new, but a confluence of trends — advances in technology, changing consumer preferences and banks’ need to diversify their balance sheets — has made it more popular than ever.
For the second week in a row, the CFPB's leadership shakeout dominated readers' attention, while a regional banker discussed efforts to fight hacking and the impact of the tax cuts, and bitcoin's price soared.
During a sit-down interview, Bruce Van Saun, the CEO at Citizens Financial, explained how Washington policy changes could boost lending, why cyber threats keep him up nights and how fintechs and AI are changing the industry for the better.
The Rhode Island bank plans to build out its fee income capabilities, expand C&I lending in the Southeast, renegotiate vendor contracts and take other steps to produce expense cuts and revenue enhancements of at least $90 million.
Fees from capital markets activities have propelled profits at several regional banks when they needed it —and just as the Glass-Steagall redux crowd wants to kill that business.
Executives at BB&T, KeyCorp and Citizens are milking commercial lending niches and balancing cost control with new investments while waiting for more rate hikes to fatten margins.
The "Citizens Checkup" program to help customers set financial goals has come under fire, but CEO Bruce Van Saun says it is valuable and "here to stay," and that the criticism of it pales in comparison to the Wells Fargo scandal.
