UnionBanCal is taking the unusual step of marking up the value of Pacific Capital's loan portfolio as part of its $1.5 billion deal for the Santa Barbara, Calif., lender.

Madison National Bancorp Inc. said on Monday that Daniel L. Murphy, the co-chairman and chief executive of the Melville, N.Y., company, has died.

Union Bank of California is buying bank holding company Pacific Capital, in one of the largest bank deals in years.

Large financial institutions dominate most of the nation's biggest cities. There are still some metropolitan areas where a community bank has the most deposits, often by wide margins. Here are some notable examples, based on June 30 data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

In what would be its largest acquisition in more 15 years, UnionBanCal Corp. in San Francisco is buying Pacific Capital Corp. in Santa Barbara, Calif., for about $1.5 billion in cash.

Longtime community bank investor Eric Hovde has traded Washington D.C. for Wisconsin in the hopes of taking up residence in the nation's capitol.

For a second time in three weeks, regulators have shuttered a bank that others were unwilling to acquire.

Prices fell and the pace of dealmaking slowed last month, but March started off strong with another big deal in Texas.

Richard Hendrix, the president and CEO of FBR & Co., says that earnings and price expectations must "reset" for capital to come back to banks. In a wide-ranging Q&A, he discussed bankers' reluctant to tap capital markets and his belief that it could take time before a meaningful level of IPOs take place.

To create a mobile banking offering that can compete with banks or the likes of Google, the prepaid card marketer Green Dot is purchasing the location-based deals company Loopt.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has ended a formal agreement with City National Bank of Florida.

Buoyed by strong top-line revenue growth and improved asset quality, the $1.2 billion-asset First Business Financial Services in Madison, Wis., reported record profits in 2011.

Three years ago, the Seattle bank was struggling mightily with bad loans and diminishing capital. A recently completed IPO put $96 million back into the bank, putting it on the path to recovery.

A year and a half after completing its recapitalization, Sterling Financial Corp. in Spokane, Wash., has been released from an enforcement order with the Federal Reserve Board.

FDIC objected to private equity deal involving Prosperity Bank Co. in St. Augustine, Fla., sources said. It had served as a model for a good bank/bad bank deal involving BankAtlantic that a judge recently blocked.

Two California banks have repaid funds they received from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

With at least one success, defendants are attempting to use state "business-judgment" rules to their advantage.

The first thing Michael Blodnick — the head of Glacier Bancorp Inc. in Kalispell, Mont. — looks at when considering buying another bank?

Joseph Stilwell is trying to gain seats on the mutual holding company's board with the solitary goal of getting the management team to sell.

First Citizens BancShares Inc. in Raleigh, N.C., reported only modest earnings growth in 2011 as income gains from failed-bank acquisitions were largely offset by higher loss provisions related to loans it inherited in those deals.