NEW YORK, July 21 (Reuters) – MetLife (MET.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the largest
life insurance company in the United States, has put its
banking operations up for sale to avoid the “too big to fail”
regulatory scrutiny that analysts have said was likely.

MetLife said on Thursday it may sell MetLife Bank’s
depository business, which includes savings and money market
accounts. The company said it will still write home mortgages;
life insurers tend to like mortgages as part of a diversified
investment portfolio.

BANGALORE/NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. cleaning products giant Ecolab Inc offered to buy water treatment services company Nalco Holding Co for $5.4 billion, as it looks to bolster its presence in the lucrative market to treat residual water from drilling for oil.

Increasing pressure on shale gas drillers to clean up their act from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has opened up a new revenue stream for companies like Nalco and Clean Harbors in the waste water clean-up market.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Capital One Financial Corp (COF.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Wells Fargo (WFC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) are among the bidders for HSBC Holdings Plc’s (HSBA.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) U.S. credit card portfolio, according to sources familiar with the situation.

In a separate HSBC asset sale, U.S. regional banks First Niagara Financial Group (FNFG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), KeyCorp (KEY.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), and M&T Bank Corp (MTB.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) are among the bidders for the bank’s upstate New York branches, sources said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jefferies Group Inc (JEF.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), a midsized brokerage with an equities trading lineage, is making an ambitious bet on investment banking when many of its larger rivals are cutting back.

The bank is hiring aggressively and has ordered its bankers to focus on bigger, more profitable deals to move up the Wall Street pecking order.

BANGALORE/NEW YORK, July 7 (Reuters) – Gaz Metro surprised
investors when it offered Central Vermont Public Service Inc
a measly 15 cents per share more than what the utility is
getting in a $470 million takeover deal with Fortis Inc
.

The Quebec-based interloper is hoping its $472 million bid
would be enough for it to wrest away Vermont’s largest utility
from Fortis, thanks to the savings it has promised CVPS
customers, a source familiar with the situation said.

NEW YORK/CHICAGO (Reuters) – NYSE Euronext shareholders approved a $9.6 billion takeover of the American exchange operator by Germany’s Deutsche Boerse AG on Thursday, moving the focus across the Atlantic where the deal faces its toughest battles.

The deal now needs approval from 75 percent of Deutsche Boerse shareholders by Wednesday, and then must survive a thorny European Commission antitrust review that is likely to run through the rest of the year.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New York Stock Exchange, an icon of American capitalism, moved closer to ceding control to a German company on Thursday, with few investors lodging any protest.

Some 65.6 percent of NYSE Euronext (NYX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) shareholders backed the $9.4 billion takeover of the company that owns the NYSE by Deutsche Boerse AG (DB1Gn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), preliminary vote results from the NYSE showed. About 96 percent of votes cast were in favor, the company said. The final vote results are expected on Friday.

NEW YORK, July 6 (Reuters) – Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is finding
its consumer finance unit, OneMain Financial, to be a tough
sell.

In recent days, Moody’s Investors Service gave OneMain a
lower preliminary credit rating than what the U.S. bank had
been expecting, making it more expensive to finance a deal,
according to a source familiar with the situation on
Wednesday.

NEW YORK, June 27 (Reuters) – Bank of Montreal’s (BMO.TO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)
BMO Capital Markets, fresh from a two-year hiring spree, is
further staffing up its U.S. investment bank to take advantage
of a surging market for merger advisory.

The bank is planning to hire investment bankers in the
United States for its financial services, real estate and
technology teams this year, Perry Hoffmeister, head of U.S.
investment and corporate banking, told Reuters in an interview
on Friday.

NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) – The Lulz Security group of
rogue hackers announced it was disbanding on Saturday with one
last data dump, which included internal AOL Inc (AOL.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and
AT&T (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) documents.

LulzSec, which gained wide recognition for breaching the
websites of Sony Corp (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the CIA and a British police
unit among other targets, said in a statement that it had
accomplished its mission to disrupt corporate and government
bodies for entertainment.