Missouri

The Arkansas company will pay $434 million for Landrum Co., which has branches in Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.

The city, among the Midwest's most vibrant C&I markets, is luring community banks, as well as giants like PNC and JPMorgan Chase.

Over the past two years, Uma Wilson's strategy took a program that had been losing customers on a year-over-year basis and transformed it into the fastest-growing issuer of Visa cards in the region.

Reliance Bancshares was in a position to reject five buyout offers over the course of a year before it got one it liked.

When Trinity Capital in New Mexico put itself up for sale last summer, it reached out to several local banks to gauge their interest. Then came a surprise offer from a suitor based a thousand miles away.