Retail & Commercial

With its very survival at stake, the San Francisco-based marketplace lender is balancing key priorities that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Trustmark in Jackson, Miss., reduced its workforce by more than 6% by offering early retirement packages.

Wintrust Financial in Rosemont, Ill., is planning to raise about $160 million through a common stock offering.

Highlands Bancorp in Vernon, N.J., has raised $7.5 million to exit the Small Business Lending Fund.

Lenders are questioning the legal justification for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's putting a 36% annual percentage rate threshold in its payday proposal, claiming loans made at that rate are unprofitable. That figure has been the subject of intense debate in the past decade.

PNC Financial Services Group has been named the official bank of the University of Kentucky, its 50th such partnership with a college or university.

A longtime California bank regulator and executive has joined the board at Hanmi Financial in Los Angeles.

Throw Cathy Bessant of Bank of America a question about a hot tech topic, and she's got answers. Blockchain? She loves it but is still waiting for its use case. Patents? The law is making us be aggressive. Swift? A call to action. And that's just the start.

The financial crisis, and its aftermath, created a new layer of regulation to consider. A growing need to fund technology projects and an uncertain rate environment have only made it harder to forecast revenue and expenses.

Debt collectors are facing increasing pressure from the CFPB through aggressive regulation by enforcement. In the past few years, the CFPB has entered into consent orders with debt buyers, banks and other lenders. The orders limit debt sales, increase data requirements and forbid various collection practices.