It was a fairly dramatic couple of days for regional banks, after two lenders disclosed lawsuits that claimed they were the victims of loan fraud. Bank stocks tumbled Thursday and regained much of those losses Friday.

Many banks also reported earnings this week. Big U.S. banks have been raking it in, thanks mostly to their investment banking and trading departments. But regional banks don’t really do those kinds of things.

Regional banks are midsize banks that typically cater to midsize companies. Think, the kind of businesses you might pass on the way to work.

“Distribution warehouses, it’s going to be the companies that own the office buildings. It’s companies that are sizable, but they’re not an everyday brand name,” said Nate Tobik, CEO of Complete Bank Data.

He said regional banks offer services to those companies that smaller lenders might not, including wealth management and tools that help companies with their day-to-day cash flows.

Tobik said one line of business that’s doing well lately is commercial lending, because commercial loans are typically renewed every few years.

“There’s a lot of loans that were made back during COVID at historically low rates that are now resetting at market rates,” he said.

Many of those loans are commercial real estate loans.

Gerard Cassidy, a bank analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said commercial real estate borrowers have had some trouble in recent years, thanks in large part to work-from-home trends.

“There have been real issues in the downtown office space market, and we have seen defaults,” he said.

But Cassidy said that’s not necessarily a problem for regional lenders. That’s because many of the toughest markets for commercial real estate are in big, urban cities.

“So when you have a small regional bank in Nashville, Tennessee, they’re not lending into the market in New York City or in San Francisco, they’re lending in their local markets in Tennessee,” he said.

And while some regional banks have reported credit losses in recent days, Cassidy said that’s likely not a sign of wider trouble. Credit quality across regional banks is generally strong, he said.

Julie Hill, dean of the University of Wyoming College of Law, said if the Federal Reserve keeps cutting interest rates, regional lenders could get even stronger.

“First, that’ll make it so that banks don’t have to pay as much money to attract deposits. But it’ll also spur some demand for borrowing,” she said.

But Hill said all of that depends on the outlook for the economy. And right now that outlook’s pretty murky.

“And so any time you introduce uncertainty, it makes banks nervous about lending, nervous about overextending,” she said.

A report out this week from the Federal Reserve found that many lenders and borrowers are feeling cautious.