Rhoda Altom and Deborah Gavin will join the boards of Washington Banking and its $1.7 billion-asset Whidbey Island Bank in Coupeville, Wash., the company said Thursday.

Union First Market Bancshares (UBSH) in Richmond, Va., is set to begin a share repurchase program.

Bank of America's (BAC) precrisis sales of mortgage-backed securities are under investigation by the New York attorney general.

Taking inventory at the branch, right down to the office chairs, gets a radiopowered reboot.

Regulators shouldn't be managing banks, says a former bank supervisor for the Minneapolis Fed.

Traditional bankers could be forgiven for hoping that the direct banks would have gotten their comeuppance by now. But the branchless (or nearly branchless) upstarts look to be very much on the ball.

Median deposits per branch have jumped significantly since 2007 for many banks.

The qualified mortgage rule issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could be disruptive to the FHA single-family program, so the Department of Housing and Urban Development is starting the process of issuing its own QM rule.

United Community Financial in Youngstown, Ohio, has added an advisor to the company to its board.

United Financial Bancorp in West Springfield, Mass., is closing a pair of Connecticut branches just months after buying them.

Bankers must concentrate on achieving greater efficiencies, stop focusing on short-term goals and strike the right balance between unacceptably poor compliance practices and unattainable perfection.

The banking industry's pace of expansion, which had shown signs of accelerating in late 2012, appears to have lost momentum.

Darrell Green, an initial investor in the bank, enjoyed a Hall of Fame career with the National Football League's Washington Redskins.

Flushing Financial in Lake Success, N.Y. is now a bank. The $4.5 billion-asset company said Thursday that it had also merged Flushing Savings Bank and Flushing Commercial Bank to create a commercial bank chartered in New York.

The 11 state attorneys general who have joined a lawsuit against the Dodd-Frank Act are arguing for their case to be heard despite a request by the government to dismiss the suit.

Lenders are lowering rates and stretching out loan terms to win business, and that combination could spell trouble when interest rates rise.

Bank of American Fork in Utah held a retirement party Wednesday for an executive who has spent 45 years with the bank.

A big gain in servicing fees propelled Ocwen Financial (OCN) in the fourth quarter. Earnings at the Atlanta mortgage servicer rose to $65.1 million, compared with $9.7 million a year earlier.

The deal-hungry Independent Bank Group in Mckinney, Texas, is planning to raise up to $92 million through an initial public offering.

Some of the nation's biggest banks are touting their small business bona fides. Citigroup (NYSE:C) said Thursday the company's lending to small business borrowers rose 21% in 2012 from a year earlier, to $9.6 billion.