Correspondent Blog

No matter what you think of NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s politics, his campaign is worth studying for bank marketing lessons. Bank marketing has entered a new phase, and many institutions are not ready for it. For decades, banks have relied on a familiar playbook: website, emails, branch signage, events, sponsorships, and the occasional brand refresh….

The dominant market story for 2026 is inflation is cooling, and employment market is uncertain, so the Federal Reserve will keep trimming rates until policy looks comfortably “neutral.”  But the current evidence points to a less comfortable possibility: the Fed may be done cutting for a while, and if inflation risk re-accelerates or employment levels…

One reason why banks have efficiency ratios over 40% is because they install a bunch of actions – workflow, technology, and strategy, which assume that banks need to operate in silos. Commercial banking has one set of solutions, while retail has another. Banks keep data in 30+ various places, have 40+ different data models, and…

Community banks are starting to embrace loan hedging as an effective tool for risk management, loan production, and fee income generation in commercial lending. These banks have concluded that using interest rate hedges on commercial loans has several benefits to the bank that include interest rate risk mitigation, credit enhancement, pricing discipline, increased borrower retention…

When it comes to bank marketing, there is usually a good time and a bad time to market bank products. Marketing during December, for example, is expensive and 40x harder to convert customers compared to September. Marketing savings, money market, or certificate of deposit accounts during tax time is a good move, while marketing treasury…

With regard to commercial real estate, an assumable commercial loan allows a buyer of the property to take over the seller’s existing mortgage, keeping the basic economics of the loan in place. The basic economics of the loan include rate, term, prepayment provisions, and other key features. However, the basic economics may be adjusted to…

It was a sunny June day back in 1974 when Herstatt Bank, a German community bank out of Cologne, had thousands of U.S. Dollar payments that it wanted to send out to New York banks before it shut down at 4:30 in the afternoon. Because no NY bank was open, those payments could not be…

The Administration announced that it is evaluating the possibility of offering home mortgages that are portable, assumable and have a 50-year amortization. The goal of these ideas is to make US home ownership more affordable. We believe that there are many other more germane factors constraining home affordability, but these ideas deserve consideration and attention….

In banking, complex problems often have many moving parts: regulatory change, technology shifts, customer behaviors, competitive dynamics, pricing pressures. It’s tempting to jump into solutioning the primary visible symptoms (e.g., “our margins are shrinking”) and assume you’ve solved the issue. But what if you’ve only tackled the tip of the iceberg? When it comes to…

Delivering superior service is critical in banking. In our previous article (HERE) we discussed why delivering value to customers drives value for shareholders. Value in banking (or any business) is measured by a simple formula that states the following: Customer Value = Perceived Benefits – Perceived Costs. Perceived benefits include factors like quality, service, brand,…

In banking, there are thousands of processes that scream for intelligent automation. Many banks have adopted robotic process automation (RPA) in the last ten years and now banks of all sizes are contemplating operationalizing agentic AI.  Agentic AI platforms in banking represent a transformative shift toward more autonomous systems that can perceive environments, make decisions,…

The crucial factor in delivering value to your shareholders is first delivering value to your customers. Most community banks understand that simply delivering lower price or looser credit standards can deliver value to customers, but over the long-term it dilutes value to shareholders. However, the empirical data shows that the majority of banks fall into…