Banking company profits are expected to grow more slowly this year than last year, but investors are still loading up on bank stocks.

First Community Bancshares Inc. in Bluefield, Va., plans to sell two of its branches for $1.1 million.

Bazile R. Lanneau Jr. is an unlikely activist investor.

Nasdaq has notified Pulaski Financial Corp. in St. Louis that it is out of compliance with a requirement that it have at least three outside directors on its audit committee.

Merchants & Manufacturers Bancorp Inc. in New Berlin, Wis., said Friday that it is restating fourth-quarter earnings after discovering troubled loans at one of its subsidiary banks.

Three banking companies with branches in Chicago are working with law enforcement officials to help stem a recent surge in bank robberies.

City of Boston Credit Union, located inside City Hall, is seeking permission from state regulators to expand its field of membership to cover three of the state's most populous counties.

Immigrants from Latin America are the nation's the fastest-growing group, but many banks are just now seeing demographic changes in their markets.

Liberty Bell Bank of Cherry Hill, N.J., lost less money last year, its second full year in operation.

Fourth-quarter earnings of Salisbury Bancorp Inc. of Lakeville, Conn., fell 25% from a year earlier, to $793,000.

Though the $8.4 billion-asset Trustmark Corp. has the No. 1 deposit share in Mississippi, it was spared the worst of Hurricane Katrina's destruction - because it had no branches on the Gulf.

NEW ENGLAND

Bancshares of Florida Inc., a three-bank holding company in Naples, is buying the $93 million-asset Bristol Bank of Coral Gables for $21 million in cash and stock.

MBT Financial Corp. of Monroe, Mich., revised its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings to reflect a $740,000 addition to its loan-loss allowance.

Capitol Bancorp Ltd. of Lansing, Mich., is making another run at an Asian-American bank.

Pentagon Federal Credit Union in Alexandria, Va., has formed a full-service real estate brokerage, PenFed Realty LLC.

Brookline Bancorp's deal to buy control of Eastern Finance LLC, a small finance company in New York that lends mainly to self-service laundries, is not as unusual as its sounds.

Terry R. Jorde, who today will become the chairman of the Independent Community Bankers of America, owes her enthusiasm for small banks partly to a potato farmer.