After a surprising fall swoon, demand for commercial loans bounced back in December. Lenders, meanwhile, are paying much more attention to how falling energy prices could impact loan portfolios.

State Bank Financial in Atlanta reported a decline quarterly profits as the accounting benefits related to its failed-bank purchases continued to wane.

Banks have made progress cutting their exposure to risky home equity lines of credit, ahead of a key 10-year threshold when billions of dollars of them will reset to higher monthly payments. But there are some prominent exceptions, especially among regional banks.

The ATM and bank technology provider Diebold has named two executives to lead its international finance and data security offices.

The National Consumer Law Center wants the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ban all out-of-statute debt collections, arguing that the practice of chasing "zombie debts" is unfair, deceptive and abusive.

New York Community Bancorp wants Washington to raise the asset size for systemically important financial institutions, but in the meanwhile its asset sales to stay under the threshold helped to boost profits and its CEO is pursuing possible M&A deals.

Astoria Financial in Lake Success, N.Y., reported higher quarterly profit that benefitted from a sizable reserve release.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday proposed a series of regulatory relief measures for small institutions, especially those in rural areas, to help them provide credit while they try to follow the agency's tough mortgage rules.

Banks with $35 billion or less in assets are slowly recovering financially, as revenue and profit improved in the fourth quarter. Here is a look at how more than 240 banks tracked by American Banker finished off 2014.

Umpqua Holdings in Portland, Ore., fell short of Wall Street expectations for the fourth quarter because of a decline in fee-based income.

A new study says Americans are getting hooked on mobile banking.

Ameris Bancorp in Moultrie, Ga., has has agreed to buy Merchants and Southern Banks of Florida in Gainesville, along with a number of Bank of America branches.

Debt-buying giant PRA Group, based in Norfolk, Va., has hired Nancy Porter as vice president of corporate communications.

TracFone, the largest prepaid mobile provider in the U.S., will pay $40 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it deceived millions of consumers with false promises of unlimited data service.

As regulators continue to scrutinize payday lending and associated products, a California startup thinks it has come up with a unique alternative for offering credit to those with lower credit scores — and some financial institutions are already signing up.

Joining the hunt for higher-yielding niche loans, the asset management unit of NewOak Capital has quietly launched a private fund to acquire nonqualified residential mortgages.

Banks like Cullen/Frost and BOK Financial say they have found one, in the form of higher energy-sector loan balances last quarter and the chance to finance consolidation among oil firms. But such spurts may only mask longer-term problems.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a letter Wednesday emphasizing that financial institutions should take a measured approach to banking relationships rather than cutting ties with entire lines of businesses.

Dumping entire categories of clients is a crude and inappropriate reaction to large fines, says Stephen Platt, author of Criminal Capital: How the Finance Industry Facilitates Crime." However, he says, regulators should hold a dialogue with banks and attempt to accommodate businesses that carry high risk but whose services are desperately required, such as remittances to war-torn Somalia.

The government has added further protections to reverse mortgage borrowers' spouses who are not named in the loan agreement, but placed conditions under which they are ineligible for older protections.