Correspondent Blog

Maybe you saw Oppenheimer over the weekend, maybe it was Barbie, or perhaps you did the “Barbenheimer” thing and did both. Maybe you opted for Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part I. No matter your choice, there was a clear winner: Barbie. Film quality aside, there have been few movies in the history of the…

If you are looking to see the future of how banks will utilize artificial intelligence (AI), look no further than marketing. Even if you are not a bank marketer, this article is worth a read to understand AI’s capabilities. Bank marketing AI is ground zero to showcase the transformation that is already taking place. We…

Our previous article discussed how the banking industry is taking advantage of interest rate swaps to offer borrowers lower rates, allowing banks to earn higher yields, generate substantial fee income, and protect deposit relationships.  Of the largest 250 banks, 90% are using interest rate swaps, and because these largest 250 banks hold 83% of all…

Next week, FedNow goes live, ushering in the next era of faster payments. Some 57 financial institutions will start with FedNow, including about 42 banks (plus a handful of core systems providers and fintechs). FedNow joins The Clearing House, which has offered real-time payments (RTP®) for the last five years. Banks are about to win…

With an inverted yield curve, borrowers have a pricing advantage to lock in long-term fixed-rate loans, while lenders strongly desire to limit loan duration.  One possible solution to this dichotomy is for banks to offer interest rate swaps to hedge individual loans.  This article will review domestic banks’ adoption of interest rate swaps.  Next week’s…

Many banks pride themselves on superior customer service, and approximately 90% of all community banks believe that they provide an above-average level of customer service (the math cannot work that way).  The reason bankers should want to provide an above-average level of service is to increase profitability, which translates to charging customers more in the…

ISO 20022 is an international standard, a language for electronic data exchange between financial institutions, and was developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It’s a way for banks to speak with each other, and it started to be phased in during the first quarter of this year with the goal of a complete…

In the last article, we covered the basics of EOS (HERE), the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and how some banks use it to improve productivity. EOS is a comprehensive business system that empowers a leadership team to run a more successful bank. EOS comprises a series of tools and concepts that guide leaders in managing and…

For the first time in ten meetings and the first time in 15 months, the Federal Reserve left its fed funds rate unchanged at 5.00–5.25%.  However, far from settling future interest rate moves, the “Fed Pause” creates several perplexing future monetary scenarios. While the Fed did pause, it increased its terminal rate forecast by another…

Likely, you do not have a common management framework at your bank. Maybe you practice some of the teachings in the seminal book Good to Great, you might work in Porter’s Five Forces, maybe you use an Objective and Key Results (OKRs) approach, or you might loosely use the McKinsey 7S Model. However, it is…

On our loan hedging desk, we work with hundreds of banks ranging in size from just over $100mm in assets to some national banks with over $1T in assets. Combined with our relationship profitability model, Loan Command, we see the pricing of thousands of commercial loans per month as small as $30k and as large…

Yours might be the case of the emperor lacking clothes. While many banks are helping their clients with employee retention credits (ERC) (If you are not, see HERE), many banks with 500 employees or less still need to collect their OWN ERC rebates. During the pandemic, most banks retained their employees and suffered higher costs,…