The Federal Reserve's stress tests and capital decisions this week help clarify which banks can afford to buy, how much they can pay and which might need to sell.

LifeLock is betting that its acquisition of ID Analytics, which closed Wednesday, will help it better market its services to retail banks.

Discover Financial Services will have its credit cards issued outside of the United States for the first time, thanks to a new deal in Ecuador.

Two small Massachusetts mutual thrifts are planning to join forces in hopes of gaining the scale to better compete against larger banks.

Several regional banks that were also stress-tested by the Federal Reserve but whose results were not made public announced that they have passed their tests. Some, including Comerica, Huntington and Discover, plan to free up trapped capital.

For the second time in less than a year, Colony Financial Inc. in Los Angeles has raised fresh capital through a stock offering.

Regions Financial Corp. will raise about $900 million in a common stock offering as part of a plan to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Northfield Bancorp Inc. in Avenel, N.J., has agreed to buy Flatbush Federal Bancorp Inc. in Brooklyn, N.Y., in a deal that will combine two mutual holding companies.

Wintrust Financial Corp. in Lake Forest, Ill., will raise up to $126.5 million in capital through a preferred stock offering.

BB&T shouldered more risk when it agreed to make its already complex deal for BankAtlantic more complicated. But the risk is manageable -- and worth it, experts say.

Mistakes happen when increasing business demands drive decisions that exceed what bank core systems can do. Unfortunately, those demands keep coming.

Great Western Bancorp. Inc. of Watertown, S.D., has agreed to buy North Central Bancshares Inc. in Fort Dodge, Iowa, for $41.5 million.

Lone Star Funds has agreed to buy $1 billion in commercial loans from CIT Group, the small business lender run by John Thain after emerging from bankruptcy in December 2009, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.

BB&T said Tuesday that it would pay off holders of BankAtlantic's trust-preferred securities and take an interest in additional assets to rescue the stalled deal.

Customers of the failed securities firm MF Global, who have been awaiting the fate of $1.6 billion in missing funds, have received an offer for their funds from Barclays Capital that would make them nearly whole.

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.

HSBC Holdings PLC is planning to sell or close retail operations in seven Asian countries that it has decided not to focus investment on, the Financial Times reported Monday citing the bank's chief executive in Asia Peter Wong.

A breakdown of M&A announcements for the last week

The list of potential bank buyers is growing at a faster rate than the ranks of sellers, according to a new research note by KBW Inc.'s Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc.

Private equity fixed Pacific Capital and has agreed to sell it to UnionBanCal for a healthy price in a slow M&A market. There could have been more deals like this had regulators embraced PE.