Banking

Over the past year, Centric Financial CEO Patricia Husic has made several big hires and added a 25,000-square-foot corporate office for the bank.

Amazon's voice assistant will soon be in cars and even microwaves, but banks have not yet proven to customers they can serve them with conversational tech.

"Normal system upgrade" knocks out SunTrust's online- and mobile-banking ops; "just a matter of time" before Amazon, Google enter mortgages; Wells Fargo looking for Tim Sloan's replacement?; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Sound Credit Union in Tacoma, Wash., has agreed to buy Bank of Washington in Lynnewood.

The San Juan company has largely recovered from the hurricane that hit a year ago, and it has made extensive preparations for future natural disasters. Yet its home market is still suffering from debt and net outmigration of residents.

The agency wants more information as it conducts fair-lending exams, but conflicting statutes make writing a data collection rule difficult.

Union Bankshares in Virginia has been adding executives from much larger competitors as it looks to compete more effectively with bigger banks

The Dallas company said a commercial client submitted falsified documents that inflated how much colloteral it had available.

Wells Fargo CEO tackles cost-cutting, job cuts and rumors he’ll be replaced; banks put up millions to keep uber-rich as depositors.

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web. Today: U.K. regulators examine PayPal's iZettle deal; Equifax gets fined in the U.K.; Paytm complains about Google Pay and data; Amazon announces lots of new Echo technology.

Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce company which Walmart bought in August, has launched a cardless credit program for consumers and is expected to apply for an NBFC licence, or a classification as non-bank that provides credit and other financial services in India.

Readers react to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's fintech charter, respond to another bank outage, opine on the impact of regulation and more.

The acquisitive company plans to buy Blue Hills Bancorp to boost its footprint in eastern Massachusetts.

When the Birmingham, Ala., bank was rethinking its branch strategy, it had to reconsider the role of its tellers. Ultimately, it decided to transition those workers to a more general banker role that emphasizes meaningful conversations with customers and continuous career progression.

The cuts are part of a broader effort to trim expenses by roughly $3 billion a year by 2020.

Following an increase in the CRE appraisal threshold for community bankers earlier this year, the National Credit Union Administration has proposed an even bigger shift for CUs.

Seven other banks passed on a chance to bid on FCB Financial, perhaps showing the small pool of large buyers eager to make a big commitment to the Sunshine State.

The company said the move should address investor concerns about potential margin compression, slower loan growth and an economic slowdown.

Every month, from January to April of this year, there were roughly 3.2 billion attacks perpetrated by malicious code that infiltrated business' networks. Representatives of smaller financial institutions disputed the notion that they are one of the weak links in the chain.

All three credit unions hold less than $250 million in assets.