Commercial lending

The Ohio company is eager to rev up SBA lending in the Windy City now that it has closed on its purchase of FirstMerit. CEO Steve Steinour also credits his company's willingness to make big upfront community commitments for a seamless approval process.

Avant, an online consumer lender based in Chicago, is shoring up its funding base with a pair of new transactions.

This year federal and state regulators have started to pay closer attention to the rapidly evolving online-lending sector — particularly online small-business lending. What follows is a look at eight key players in the debate over how to regulate this emerging industry.

State-sponsored green banks in New York and elsewhere provide a valuable service as "party planners" that bring developers and private lenders together on alternative energy projects.

United Community and Wells Fargo are among the banks building platforms to lend to senior-care facilities. Demographics suggest the business should grow significantly in coming years.

Online alternative financing can be an efficient source of capital for small businesses, but it can also be predatory, especially to unaware and inexperienced borrowers.

A federal judge in California approved a $2.4 million settlement in a class- action lawsuit against Social Finance, a San Francisco-based online lender.

Many energy lenders are paring back exposure to the energy sector, creating opportunities for banks like First Horizon and Bank of the Ozarks.

Small-business owners are struggling to understand the cost of loans sold by marketplace lenders. To remedy this, the industry must embrace a disclosure box that includes these five principles.

Square Inc. is joining with restaurant technology startup Upserve to offer loans to eating establishments, extending credit for the first time to businesses that operate outside of its own payments processing system.

The emergence of lenders that have no real connection to a geographic area prompts questions over how the Community Reinvestment Act's "good neighbor" policy can continue.

Small-business owners heard "no" more often in July when seeking loans from big banks after six months of improving prospects.

The embattled firm is offering financial incentives in an effort to kick-start lending, but compliance-focused banks have been slow to respond.

The marketplace lender OnDeck Capital is sticking with its lend-and-hold strategy even though the practice contributed to a second consecutive quarterly loss.

Lending Club announced the resignation of its chief financial officer while reporting an $81.4 million quarterly loss due largely to fallout from the scandal that rocked the firm in May.

By buying EverBank Financial, the insurance and retirement savings behemoth will gain billions of dollars in low-cost deposits and access to many new lending products that it can offer to millions of clients.

Community banks are often burdened with manual data entry for processing commercial loans. Union State Bank has turned to digitization software to make it easier. It may sound modest in the age of APIs, but it made a quantifiable difference.

The biggest change in banking in the last 60 years is the shift in balance sheets from business lending to real estate finance and therefore more risk tied to volatile real estate prices.

The scandal-plagued marketplace lender is set to report earnings Monday, and the results aren't likely to be pretty. The big question going forward is how quickly can it reverse the damage and win back the trust of investors.

The impressive loan growth in the second quarter is surprising in an economy that grew by 1.2% in the second quarter and by only 0.8% in the first quarter.