Retail & Commercial

Dorothy Savarese, the head of Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank in Massachusetts, seeks a financial system where the rules encourage community banks and big banks to do the things that they are best at.

Thanks to smart investments and relentless cutting of assets and businesses, Citi is looking leaner and healthier than it has in a long time.

Wells Fargo’s freshly installed CEO made clear Friday that he wants to chart a new course following the revelation that thousands of employees opened phony accounts. But Tim Sloan made few promises about what the megabank will eventually look like.

Profit at Farmers & Merchants Bank of Long Beach in California improved in the third quarter, due to loan growth and increased securities income.

Apart from the usual queries about prospects for loan growth and strategies for controlling costs, bank executives better be prepared this earnings season for probing questions about in-branch sales practices and how they are compensating front-line employees.

Concerns about bad oil loans have begun to fade, but other credit problems could be lurking. Several big banks reported a notable uptick in provisions for consumer loan losses.

BancorpSouth has extended the deadline to complete two acquisitions until the end of 2017 as it seeks to resolve a recent CRA downgrade.

First Bancshares in Hattiesburg, Miss., has agreed to buy two banks in Alabama and Florida and it announced plans for a capital-raise to fund the deals.

Its reputation tarnished by revelations that employees opened roughly 2 million phony accounts in order to meet sales targets, Wells Fargo last month suffered a steep decline in new retail checking accounts and credit card applications.

Consumers voted with their feet in September, as the embattled bank said Friday that new checking accounts were down by 25% from a year earlier.