Correspondent Blog

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…

As more prospective customers turn to AI for search, banks must ensure they appear in AI-generated results. To identify best practices, we analyzed top-performing banks and reverse-engineered their tactics, then distilled the findings into a practical primer and checklist for bank executives, product managers, and line-of-business leaders to use in conversations with their marketing teams….

We were recently collaborating with a community banker who was trying to win a relationship client from a regional bank. The issue was that the incumbent bank was pricing this client at a credit spread of 1.25% over SOFR and our client banker was told that his bank would not accept less than 2.40% credit…

Want to make better decisions and be a better leader? Understanding system thinking is a great unlock. Last week (HERE), we discussed the importance of system thinking and described the four main types of systems (below) that bankers need to recognize before solving a challenge. In this article, we provide a framework for managing problem…

Few questions matter more to a community bank than how its earnings respond when interest rates move. Yet little research has been published to answer this question or how variable-rate lending contribute to risk and profitability. A recent study in 2026 by James W. Kolari, Ivan Pastor Sanz, and Wei Liu (ssrn-6898599) tackles that gap…