Performance reports

Want to make your bank a top performer? Spending can be a more effective strategy for success than cost cuts, if done smartly. That’s the lesson from banks with $2 billion to $10 billion of assets. ranked here by three-year average returns on equity.

How can banks improve performance while dealing with low interest rates and high regulatory expenses? One effective strategy is to bulk up, as shown by our annual ranking of the top 200 banks with less than $2 billion of assets.

Business confidence remains high, but Fed data shows commercial borrowing actually decelerated during the first quarter. Fortunately for banks, rate hikes have fattened margins.

JPMorgan Chase is shaking up the way it evaluates employees, introducing a mobile tool that lets workers across the sprawling organization send or receive instant critiques of their colleagues.

With U.S. Bancorp's leadership transition underway, the big question is whether it will deliver faster earnings growth — the one shareholder demand that has proven elusive.

The Louisiana company's call report also indicates that a steep fourth-quarter loss is looming

The French company will still have a majority stake after selling 25 million shares.

Barry Bekkedam was also fined $100,000 for a failed effort to bring in Tarp funds before NOVA failed in 2012.

Wendell Bontrager, formerly a regional president at Old National, will oversee operations, lending at strategy at Equity.

The Las Vegas-based credit union made $4.8 million in the fourth quarter, and $14.9 million in 2016.

This is the second consecutive year the credit union has returned dividends to members.

The author responds to critics who say the national movement to move money from big banks to black-owned institutions may not be fueling many loans to minorities and residents of low- to moderate-income communities.

Any economic environment, including this one, has risks but it is unclear whether banks are sufficiently worried about what lies ahead.

Bank stocks have been on a tear since the November elections, but a corresponding surge in profits could still be a few quarters away.

Almost 40 years ago, a rock music legend asked a question that too many banks are failing to address today.

Directors today are expected to perform many duties that, even a decade ago, weren't part of the job, from overseeing cybersecurity and the bank's culture to setting online and mobile strategy. Yet the composition of many bank boards hasn't changed all that much. Here's what to do if you have longtime members who lack the skills needed to help a bank compete.

Shivan Govindan, chairman of First NBC Bank in New Orleans, has taken on the task of salvaging a bank that is reeling from accounting issues and a substantial capital requirement from regulators.

The phony-accounts scandal at Wells Fargo illustrates how sales quotas can incent bad behavior. Is your bank effectively mitigating the risk of 'managing to metrics'? Or could it be in danger of becoming a 'cargo cult'?

Green Bancorp's aggressive plan to attack its credit quality troubles and do what few Texas banks once would have dreamed of – quit energy lending – make it a subject of debate and a community bank to watch closely in 2017.

Stephen Gordon has long been known as an entrepreneurial banker, which helped him expand his California bank aggressively over a five-year period. A spike in chargeoffs that led to a third-quarter loss spurred Gordon to beef up credit oversight. The question is whether that effort will stymie loan growth.