Most community bankers view credit unions and regional banks as their chief competitors, but McCall Wilson, the president of Bank of Fayette County in Tennessee, is more concerned about start-up banks.

Commercial Capital Bancorp Inc. of Irvine, Calif., said Tuesday that it was appealing a court ruling that bars bankers it recently hired away from Comerica Inc. from using "trade secrets" to solicit Comerica's customers.

Eastern Virginia Bankshares in Tappahannock is consolidating its three bank charters.

Texas United Bancshares Inc. of La Grange said Tuesday that its third-quarter net income surged 72.3% from a year earlier, to $2.7 million.

A company that is usually pretty quiet, UMB Financial Corp., has been quite busy of late.

The executives at American Business Bank in Los Angeles do not think of American as a community bank.

Old National Bancorp in Evansville, Ind., says it has joined the trend to brokerage outsourcing as a means of cutting costs and focusing on lines of business in which it is expert.

Faced with enormous demand for disaster loans, the U.S. Small Business Administration is asking banks for help.

Factoryville, Pa., is getting a new bank branch, seven months after the only branch in town was closed.

In the two months after Hurricane Katrina, Liberty Bank and Trust Co. in New Orleans lost roughly $40 million of deposits, as customers left town and the steady flow of municipal deposits dried up.

NEW ENGLANDNortheast Bancorp of Lewiston, Maine, has named Marcel Blais to the newly created job of chief operating officer at its $576 million-asset Northeast Bank.

Twenty years ago, the House Ways and Means Committee - then chaired by Illinois Democrat Dan Rostenkowski - briefly mulled a tax on credit unions as part of a package of reforms, only to drop it like a red-hot coal in the face of fierce opposition.

Virginia Financial Group Inc. in Culpeper announced Tuesday that regulators have terminated the formal agreements under which two of its bank subsidiaries had been operating for the last 20 months.

The Banc Corp. in Birmingham, Ala., said that it is changing its name to Superior Bancorp and the name of its subsidiary The Bank to Superior Bank.

Big cities such as Chicago, New York, and Dallas are getting hundreds of new branches every year, but smaller markets - Greeley, Colo., and Bowling Green, Ky., for example - are adding them even faster.

Union Bankshares Corp. of Bowling Green, Va., announced Monday that it is acquiring the $130 million-asset Prosperity Bank and Trust in Springfield, Va., for $36 million in cash.