Bank turmoil arrived in small-town America on Friday night when a tiny four-branch bank in Kansas failed, becoming the fourth lender to be seized by regulators this year and the fifth to fold altogether, YahooFinance.com reported. According to the Kansas State Banking Commissioner David Herndon, the event "had nothing to do" with the year's earlier regional bank failures. The Heartland Tri-State Bank, of Elkhart, Kan., is the smallest to go under in 2023 by far. It had $139 million in assets when it went down on Friday, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The other banks that failed thus far this year all had assets of more than $100 billion, including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The biggest was First Republic, which had $229 billion when it was seized by regulators in May, becoming the second-largest bank failure in US history. The failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March were the third- and fourth-biggest ever. Silvergate agreed in March to shut itself down voluntarily. The Kansas Office of the State Banking Commissioner said in a release that Bank Commissioner David Herndon "determined that Heartland Tri-State Bank was insolvent" and that it "became insolvent due to an isolated event."
