Capital markets

Citizens Financial is going out of market to find midsize businesses in need of credit or advisory services in uncertain times. It is a good example of the resiliency that regional banks are showing amid softer loan demand, Washington gridlock and still-low interest rates.

Canada's big banks are pursuing wholesale banking, capital markets and select M&A opportunities across the border to hedge against a slowing mortgage market and other economic concerns on the home front.

Royal Bank of Canada got an earnings boost from its U.S. capital markets business and its ownership of City National Bank in Los Angeles, helping to offset softer growth at home.

The trend of putting ever-smaller pieces of the same commercial mortgages into multiple securitizations requires investors to be extra careful, and will inevitably make workouts of bad loans more complicated.

Navient and Nelnet, the two largest student loan servicers, avoided downgrades on some $18 billion of bonds by extending their maturities. Getting the required consents from investors would normally take ages, but recent innovations speeded the process.

Double-digit gains in assets under management and administration and higher interest rates more than offset rising expenses.

Coordinators of a blockchain project backed by the financial industry say they have successfully demonstrated that the distributed ledger technology can be used to syndicate, trade and make payments on leveraged loans.