Amid the hullaballoo over CardSystems International, here's a little story that you missed.

Wal-Mart's opening a bank.

Not just any bank. A special kind of bank. An industrial bank, in Utah.

No offices, no direct deposit. Mainly, they exist to handle credit cards and other consumer loans. I'm sure the terms are very favorable, because big corporations are hotter for these than Donald Trump is for endorsement dea.s GE, Merrill Lynch, American Express and Target all have them. Berkshire Hathaway is setting one up to make loans for its R.C. Willey Home Furnishings stores. (Betcha didn't even know Buffett sold furniture.)

For some reason Wal-Mart's previous attempts to get into banking were rejected. They tried to buy a bank in California, they tried to buy one in Oklahoma, they even tried to partner with one in Canada.

No dice. But Utah held out the welcome mat, possibly because Wal-Mart promised the jobs to them.

This kind of "jurisdiction shopping" is not new, even in the credit card industry. Decades ago Citicorp made a separate incorporation in South Dakota, so it could charge what New York thought at the time was usurious interest on its credit cards. (Other states eventually scrapped their usury laws.) AT&T created a card processor -- its card is now handled by Citicorp.

Wal-Mart figures it will save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by handling its money itself, avoiding the banking system. It will also handle its own card processing.

Maybe. Banking isn't as easy as it looks. The same is true with card processing, especially after the CSI scandal. And when you screw up in either of those industries it'll wipe the smiley-face right off ya'.

Sometimes, when regulators tell you no, they're just trying to help.