Correspondent Blog

One of the most common mistakes that bankers make is benchmarking their institution against the wrong peer group. Many management teams spend hours discussing how their net interest margin (NIM) compares to the industry average, whether their efficiency ratio is above or below peers, or how deposit growth stacks up against other banks. The problem…

Across second-quarter 2026 earnings calls, one theme stood out: banks are originating loans at a healthy clip, yet balance sheets are barely growing because loan payoffs are running just as fast. S&P Global Market Intelligence reported that banks attributed the elevated payoffs to refinancing, asset and collateral sales driven by borrower liquidity events, normal project…

With complete call report data now available, the banking industry offers several useful signals that can influence how every bank thinks about positioning and strategy. In this article, we summarize the key trends for bank performance for 2Q 2026 and explain what they mean for management teams that are strategically focused and committed to data-driven…

If you are a commercial lender at a community or regional bank, the prepayment provision on your fixed-rate loans is probably the least-discussed and most valuable term in your credit agreement. Most banks either negotiate away prepayment protection entirely or rely on a step-down penalty that borrowers routinely force banks to waive at payoff. A…

Many banks have chosen Microsoft 365 Copilot as the centerpiece of their AI strategy to improve banker productivity. Bank executives must have an adoption strategy that balances innovation and widespread usage with the governance and compliance rigor. In this article, we detail what we have learned from our own experience and from other banks when…

Fixed-rate lending can create negative economic value for banks. That is, unless the bank upcharges credit spread and enforces meaningful prepayment provisions. Every fixed-rate commercial loan contains two options that the bank writes and the borrower owns. Neither appears on the term sheet as a line item. Neither is invoiced. Both are exercised at the…

If there is one underutilized bank product that can build value, it is the savings account. Most banks not only woefully neglect marketing and developing the savings account but fail to invest the energy in understanding its strategic importance. In the same vein, branch traffic is an underutilized value. In this article, we explore how…

The July FOMC meeting is complete with no change in rates. Unfortunately, we don’t know much else. If Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s approach to Federal Reserve communication can be reduced to one operating principle for bankers and borrowers, it is this: expect less help from the Fed in predicting the next rate move.  A quieter…

The banking market is flooded with core providers and platform vendors promising transformative results. Bank executives are awash in vendor pitches from a variety of sources, particularly now around AI-driven solutions. The challenge is that many banks rely on their major core or digital bank vendors for their products and take on the strategy of…

We work with over a thousand community banks across the country.  We observe and measure commercial loan pricing, seeing over a hundred commercial loans per week on average.  Our bank customers range in size from under $100mm to over $10B in assets, and we see pricing on commercial loans as small as $200k and as…

Up until this year, when a bank wanted to forecast the response to new deposit pricing, it either had to guess off its data, use a focus group or see the reaction to a test market. These methods were either inaccurate or took time. Now, synthetic data and AI-driven agents are starting to replace traditional…

Every commercial lender knows the feeling.  The bank took the hardest risk on a project – the construction phase. The bank managed the draws, monitored the budget, inspected the site, and shepherded the borrower through permitting delays and cost overruns.  Then, just as the project stabilizes and the loan finally becomes easy to hold, the…