The Top 20 Deposit-Rich Industries for 2025
In the quest for deposits, one successful tactic at top-performing banks is to target the right types of customers. While desiring to bank everyone in your community is noble, it can be a poor use of resources. Some customers offer better returns because they use more banking services and have more deposit balances. Not to…
ROE Contribution – Commercial Hedged Loans
We compared community bank profitability on hedged commercial loans to those same banks’ reported return. The goal of our analysis was to investigate if community banks can improve their performance by utilizing a hedging program. We want to caution readers that our analysis may not extend to all banks, borrowers, or regions, but the results…
6 Reasons You Should Drop Deposit Rates Now Before the Fed
It is a long held notion in banking that you only move deposit rates when the Federal Reserve moves rates. However, if you think about this practice, it doesn’t make much sense in terms of a bank’s profitability. Markets are dynamic. Interest rates, and funding costs, move independently from the Fed. In this article, we…
Bank Tools For Predicting the Future
Many bankers are struggling to analyze the current business environment and need help predicting the future. Community bankers are especially concerned about economic forecasts such as GDP, interest rates, inflation, consumer and business demand, and default rates. The difference between a good decision and a bad one may not lie in spreadsheets or economic charts…
Managing the Risk Surface of a Loan Given Tariffs
When a bank makes a loan, it’s stepping onto a multidimensional terrain of risk. Credit, interest rate, liquidity, optionality, legal and operational risk all interplay with each other to expose the bank, and the borrower, to a set of risk that can be visualized as a three-dimensional area. Given the current state of the economy,…
The Data – 6 Action Items to Boost Bank Customer Profitability
Customer profitability is often talked about but rarely understood. We analyzed the commercial loan portfolio of a regional bank to determine what products, scale, cross-sell opportunities, and expected life translates to profitability. The results may be surprising to some readers. The granularity of this data reflects the state of the banking industry, and the lessons…
How to Build a Bank Website For AI Agents
At present, we track 150+ AI agent platforms that households and business can use right now to manage banking products. While the public is currently focused on booking travel, restaurants and events, soon they will be using agents to optimize their banking. These agents can now compare different banking products, to include researching fees, and…
Managing Loan Life to Manage Bank Performance
In previous articles (here and here), we discussed how a portfolio of commercial loans with various expected average lives results in different net present value (NPV) of income and return over a ten-year period. We also identified ten variables that are responsible for extending the average expected life of a commercial loan. As we continue…
The Impact of Reciprocal Tariffs on Community Banking
“Liberation Day” brought a 10% baseline tax on all imports plus a 15% to 49% tariff rate on a defined set of nations (below). The move shook the markets, threatening to upend much of the architecture of the global economy and fueled broader trade wars. The recent uncertain shifts in trade policies, particularly increased tariffs…
Your Bank Marketing Roadmap: Transitioning from SMS to RCS
As of last month, 68% of iPhone users were running iOS 18 or higher and 92% of Android users are running their 5.0 iOS or higher. This means that thanks to recent Apple upgrades in their operating system, most phones are now capable of receiving Rich Communication Services (RCS) messages in addition to traditional SMS….
6 Steps To Be a Better Trusted Advisor During This Trade War
There have been few times in modern memory when small businesses and middle market companies faced so much uncertainty in the market. With recent DOGE government spending cuts, escalating trade tensions, immigration reform, and the implementation of tariffs, U.S. businesses find themselves navigating complex economic waters. This week, for example, is a critical time to…
Increasing Customer Cumulative Lifetime Value Through Lending
In a previous article (HERE), we discussed how a portfolio of commercial loans with various expected average lives resulted in different net present value (NPV) of income over a ten-year period. Our analysis shows that an average community bank can expect $9.7mm NPV of income (about 1% ROA) on a $100mm loan portfolio when the…