Retail & Commercial

The U.K. neobank has expanded its U.S. customer base to 300,000 mobile users and diversified its product line to include basic banking, crypto trading and investing.

The new offering’s loan structure is designed to hedge against digital currency's price volatility.

The Mississippi bank’s addition of more than a dozen bankers last year helped drive a $250 million increase in new loans during the fourth quarter. To keep the momentum going, CEO John Hairston said he intends to hire aggressively in 2022.

“Our intention is to work with all our clients, including our fossil-fuel clients, to develop credible plans and transition to net zero together,” Chief Executive Jane Fraser said.

The decision to drop the London interbank offered rate as a benchmark interest rate means that contracts for hundreds of trillions of dollars in financial assets need to be rewritten. U.S. regulators should allow existing agreements to be amended without the threat of massive litigation.

Fourth-quarter net interest income rose 11% from a year earlier to $11.4 billion at Bank of America, though its average loan balances edged up just 1% over the same period.

The economic and political conditions are in place for bank-credit union mergers to blow past last year's total of 13 despite the banking industry's strong opposition to them.

The nation’s sixth-largest bank will offer a $750 line of credit to customers who need short-term liquidity, and will gradually become less reliant on older accounts that charge the controversial fees. With the plans, Truist is moving in the same direction as many large and midsize banks.

Traditional banks could be forced to add cryptocurrency product offerings in 2022 to compete with fintechs that are taking advantage of blockchain innovations, according to Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of Anchorage.

A group of community banks and two major trade associations have formed a partnership with and invested in the fintech NYDIG to offer the service on the banks’ mobile apps by midyear. The banks say it will help them generate revenue and retain customers interested in cryptocurrency.