In Spokane and across Eastern Washington, health care affordability is no longer a future concern. It's already shaping decisions that local employers are making today about jobs, growth, and compensation.

Fans watching the Sunday Seattle Mariners game during opening weekend might have noticed a commercial featuring the team’s All-Star catcher and switch-hitter, Cal Raleigh, as the newest, high-performing team member at Spokane-based Washington Trust Bank.

Spokane-based Quantum Financial Planning Inc. is growing with the acquisition of a Spokane Valley-based financial planning company and the addition of a new financial planner.

Washington state is moving forward with the Washington Saves automatic individual retirement account program, with penalties for noncompliance beginning in 2030.

For decades, Washington state's lack of a personal income tax was one of its defining economic advantages, a feature that drew executives, entrepreneurs, and high earners across the region. That era is ending.

Washington lawmakers have repealed a tax exemption for credit unions, disrupting a fast-growing deal market for mergers and acquisitions.

Two credit unions — Spokane-based Progressions Credit Union and Boeing Employees’ Credit Union, of Tukwila, Washington — are building new branches in Spokane County.

Craft3, a nonprofit community lender that helps finance projects in underserved communities, is planning to invest between $25 million and $30 million in the Inland Northwest following an $80 million New Markets Tax Credit allocation.

Dallas-based Sunflower Bank N.A. has consolidated two Spokane branches into one new licensed depository branch and is expanding into North Idaho with the opening of a new loan production office in Coeur d’Alene to meet high demand in the Inland Northwest region.  

For most business owners in the Pacific Northwest, succession planning lives somewhere between "eventually" and "when the time comes." It sits on a list alongside other distant concerns, comfortably deferred while the immediate demands of running the business take priority.