Bank channel

Former FBI and Navy officer to take bank's top information security spot.

After hiring a MetLife mortgage team in northern California, Provident Financial Holdings said its fiscal fourth-quarter profit more-than doubled from a year ago.

JPMorgan Chase shuffled some of its high-ranking executives and streamlined its investment and retail banking operations Friday.

Gailyn Johnson, a 23-year veteran of Wells Fargo, will lead technology, operations, and corporate shared services, working with all wealth management business lines.

Wealth management services brought in $7.2 million in revenue in the second quarter, up 42.1% from the $5.1 million generated in the year-ago quarter. The boost was driven primarily by the bank's acquisition of Davidson Trust in May.

Timothy P. Mertz joined Northern Trust as a senior private banker and relationship manager and will lead a three-person banking team.

The trio brings the total staff to 19, up from 12 a year ago when the firm purchased the asset management business of Chicago-based Talon Asset Management.

Comments by former Citigroup chief executive Sandy Weill reignited the debate over whether to separate commercial banking from investment banking.

Kamal Mustafa, a former global head of M&A at Citibank who now helps to stress-test banks, fears another earnings crunch is coming and that bank valuations will sink lower than they are now.

Huntington’s second venture into the ETF market will be actively managed and use a sector-rotation strategy.

BNY Mellon has hired a former Northern Trust wealth strategist to be senior director in the firm’s Naples, Fla., office, in response to growing business in the region.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking,” Weil, 79, said today in an interview on CNBC. “Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

RBS Citizens Financial Group has signed a referral agreement with brokerage Oppenheimer & Co., in a bid to boost its commercial lending to middle-market businesses.

Bank of America has hired more than 30 bankers in the greater Chicago area as part of a broader plan to beef up its services for small-business owners.

Some 95% of bankers say the potential for SME business is at least equal to that of any other opportunity.

The Milstein family's recent sale of Emigrant Bank's New York branches shows how banks can innovate when they don't answer to a wide shareholder base.

As banks try to raise revenue and improve their reputations, they are shaking up their relationships with the "mad men" of Wall Street, testing out new advertising to help refurbish their brands.

Poverty is the next big business in banking - but there are plenty of pitfalls before it becomes the next big success in banking.

New analysis from a nonpartisan group shows that JPMorgan officials accounted for 18% of all industry meetings with the Fed concerning Dodd-Frank implementation over the past two years, while JPMorgan accounted for 17% of all meetings with Treasury. Goldman Sachs, which also held hundreds of discussions with regulators, focused mainly on the CFTC.

Bank of America Corp., shaking off some of the drag caused by faulty mortgages, swung to a second- quarter profit as losses in real estate narrowed and the company set aside less for bad loans.