Don't be surprised if Fifth Third Bancorp soon muscles its way into the regional mergers-and-acquisitions scene. President Greg Carmichael told the Business Courier in Fifth Third's hometown of Cincinnati that his team will be a buyer in the faster-growing Mid-South markets it has entered in the past decade. Last summer, Fifth Third ranked eighth in deposit market share in the Nashville MSA.

“We’ll be really thoughtful in how we expand,” Carmichael told me in an hour-long interview Monday at Fifth Third’s downtown headquarters. “We’re not really interested in getting into new markets. Our expansion objective is to get bigger in markets where we’re not in the top three or four.”

Officials with the City of Portland have teamed up with their insurance carrier to file suit against Volunteer State Bank, which they say last year allowed unauthorized wire transfers that drained the city's accounts by more than $100,000. In their complaint, the plaintiffs say a city official's computer appeared to have been highjacked by a virus last December and told to drain $175,000 from the city's water and sewer account at Volunteer State through three transfers.

One of the transfers went to an Ohio jeweler store, which promptly returned the money. But the two others went to accounts in New Jersey and California, whose unidentified owners quickly withdrew the cash. Portland and the Tennessee Municipal League Risk Management Pool say Volunteer State needs to pay them back the lost $115,000 plus interest from those two charges because "the security procedure employed by the Bank was not a commercially reasonable method of providing security against unauthorized payment orders and the Bank did not accept the fraudulent payment orders in good faith."

The year 2012 will go down in Franklin Synergy Bank's books as a very good one. In February, the community bank reported its assets had topped $500 million. Since then, it has reported record profits, opened an office in Westhaven and recruited some top talent. Now, right before the end of the year, it also is able to say that its deposits now also total more than half a billion.

The latest CoreLogic data on area foreclosures and mortgage loan delinquencies shows a big month-to-month drop in both. The foreclosure rate in October hit its lowest point since September of 2009, while the percentage of loans behind 90 days or more hadn't been that low since July of that year. CoreLogic's numbers reinforce several positive data points from other parts of the local housing market and suggest 2013 should see a pick-up in construction as well as a decent improvement in the finances of local banks that rely more heavily on mortgage lending.