Banking

Stonegate Bank in Pompano Beach, Fla., could be getting close to announcing another acquisition.

American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and our social media platforms.

An enforcement action related to anti-money-laundering compliance once again forced The Bancorp in Wilmington, Del., to report a quarterly loss.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's debt collection plan is likely to put pressure on banks and first-party creditors to provide better documentation on consumer debts that get transferred to debt buyers and collectors. While the proposal does not cover banks and first-party creditors, some experts said banks will be on the hook for providing better information.

Green Bancorp in Houston has resolved $37 million in energy loans since deciding to get out of that business.

Middleburg Financial in Virginia, which recently faced criticism from its biggest investor, has a new chairman.

BB&T Corp., North Carolina's second-largest lender, is cutting jobs in its securities unit while scaling back institutional equity sales and trading activity.

Regional banks need all the growth opportunities they can get, and Fifth Third says it has found one in catering to European businesses that need to expand in North America to escape domestic economic issues.

The popular German digital startup Fidor Bank has agreed to be acquired by Groupe BPCE, the second-largest French bank.

Regulatory burdens (particularly the Durbin interchange cap), stubbornly low interest rates and a slow, expensive transition from branch to digital banking mean only the wealthy and the desperate are attractive customers, says Todd Baker of Broadmoor Consulting.

Iberiabank in Lafayette, La., neutralized the energy issues common to Gulf region lenders these days with a one-two punch of stronger fee income and robust, more profitable lending.

Multiple acquisitions weighed down quarterly profit at TowneBank in Suffolk, Va.

Banks need to improve their use of technology designed for small-business customers soon, or risk losing them.

The week Hillary Clinton made history for women by winning her party's presidential nomination, and newspapers everywhere featured her husband Bill in their front-page photos. (Go figure.) Fed governor Lael Brainard is being touted as a possible Clinton cabinet member. Sallie Krawcheck and Jenny Knott talk Wall Street then and now, and so does Barbara Byrne, whose stories you may find mirrored in the upcoming movie "Equity." U.S. Bancorp has family therapists for the ultra-rich. Plus, Claire Calmejane, Mary Callahan Erdoes and Beth Mooney.

The $1.8 billion-asset Sunflower expects to combine with the $2.2 billion-asset Strategic Growth to create a company with $3 billion in loans and 60 branches in Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico and Texas.

Square will enable sellers to make daily bank deposits, adding another in a series of merchant-focused perks designed to diversify revenue streams and sweeten the company's appeal to businesses.

A less discussed but arguably more important application of the blockchain is to help serve the unbanked masses, including refugees.

There may be bumps along the way, but PayPal, Mastercard and Visa all share the same goal, according to Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga.

New capabilities announced Wednesday by Capital One run on Amazon.com's cloud. It's the latest sign banks are growing more comfortable using other companies' servers instead of their own closely guarded data centers — and that longstanding security concerns are fading.

Wells Fargo is facing a U.S. investigation into whether it improperly repossessed cars owned by members of the military, according to two people with knowledge of the probe.