First Reliance in South Carolina, which recently announced its first bank acquisition, is angling to take advantage of disruption caused by bigger mergers in the Carolinas.
The Illinois company, four months removed from its last bank acquisition, just announced the biggest purchase in its history. Alpine Bancorp. will add low-cost deposits and scale to Midland States' wealth management business.
Burgess, chairman of FirstCapital Bank of Texas, succeeds Dorothy Savarese, of Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank in Massachusetts, as chairman of the American Bankers Association.
Debbie Meekins is running First Community Bank in Santa Rosa while simultaneously taking steps to rebuild her own life after her home of 19 years went up in flames.
TD Bank has pledged $3 million to provide credit counseling to small-business owners. The hope is that those owners will use commercial loans to replace personal credit cards and home equity as their primary forms of business funding.
The president of the St. Louis Fed said that regulators should go back to the pre-Dodd Frank framework for small banks, while warning about changes to the system as fintechs expand their presence.
The current regulatory focus drives the growth of ever-larger, harder-to-manage and harder-to-regulate megabanks, while community banks have been left to be picked up by acquirers.
