Correspondent Blog

When it comes to deposit gathering, the first quarter of any year is critical. If you need deposits and don’t have an active tax refund deposit effort every year, then you are missing out on one of the most effective deposit gathering tactics in banking. Tax refunds are just starting to hit this week and…

We talk to thousands of lenders across the country each month about structuring and pricing loans.  We have never fielded so many questions and debates surrounding pricing differential between fixed versus floating-rate loans.  We believe that this development is primarily driven by the uncertainty of the future path of interest rates (a perennial issue for…

This month will likely go down as the “Agentic Big Bang.” The artificial intelligence landscape shifted from “chatting” to mainstream “doing,” and if you are running a community bank in the US, the ground beneath your feet just moved. Over the last two weeks, we had four seminal events – Openclaw exploded, Anthropic released Claude…

To be a better trusted advisor to your commercial borrowers, one important topic is interest rates in 2026. We recently wrote an article about how the Federal Reserve’s next interest rate move may be up and not down (here).  The aim of that article was not to take a alternative view for contrarian-sake but to…

Now that we have all the 2025 data for the banking industry, we spent some time working with Amberoon, sifting through the data, the trends, and the insights to produce a dashboard and in-depth report on almost every community bank in the U.S. Beyond metrics, this is our first iteration (now in beta form) of…

In a competitive lending market, community banks are looking for an edge to win quality loans. On quality credits, many community banks are eliminating loan origination fees and prepayment provisions to differentiate from competition. Since it is easy for any bank to eliminate fees and prepayment provisions, that competitive advantage quickly becomes commonplace and no…

With most of the banks filing their call reports, there are some interesting pictures of the banking industry that emerge. We use Amberoon’s Statum platform to analyze community banks under $20B in total assets to highlight four trends from 2025 banking performance that merit addressing when it comes to enhancing profitability in 2026. Loan and…

In recent articles (last one HERE) we discussed the importance of commercial loan prepayment speeds.  We explained the importance of keeping loans vs. making loans in driving bank profitability.  The key factor affecting a loan’s expected life, after contractual term of the loan, is the specific loan prepayment provision.  The most acceptable, marketable, and enforceable…

Many bankers have one-on-one meetings with their direct reports, and they are painful to observe when it comes to effectiveness and efficiency. They either turn into a status update or a therapy session. The problem is few bankers were taught how to conduct an effective one-on-one. After talking with more than 20 top performing banks,…

In recent articles (HERE) we discussed the importance of commercial loan prepayment speeds.  We explained why loan prepayment speed is a major factor influencing a bank’s profitability, and how national banks use historical analysis, quantitative modeling, and predictive analytics to structure loans to increase loan retention (decrease loan prepayments). We also outlined how various input…

If there was ever a skill to learn in banking in 2026, it’s artificial intelligence. It is impacting every facet of banking from Amortization to Zero-balance accounts. Since it is likely your bank restricts AI, it then falls to you to learn it on your own to help inform your bank on its use. In…

In a recent article (HERE) we discussed the importance of loan prepay speeds.  We explained why loan prepayment speed is a major factor influencing a bank’s profitability, how national banks use historical analysis, quantitative modeling, and predictive analytics to structure loans to increase loan retention (decrease loan prepayments).  We introduced the crucial factors influencing commercial…