Correspondent Blog

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,…

Community bank cost of funds is jumping up. As shown in the graph below, the net interest margin (NIM) for community banks declined 22bps in Q1’23.  Most of that NIM erosion is the result of a sharply higher cost of funding earning assets (COF). The question is – what will happen to community bank’s cost…

It is a dangerous troupe in banking that an omnichannel approach is best. The concept that we allow the customer to choose how they want to bank often enables the bank to be passive in its position and give up agency. Branching, for example, is too expensive to be all things to all people. In…

The yield curve is currently inverted, and the FOMC may take a pause at its next meeting in June.  Uncertainty about the evolution of the economy and the path of future interest rates and the unusual inverted yield curve shape affords a prime opportunity for bankers to provide sound, trusted advice to clients.  This is…

Lending is getting riskier. Due to higher rates, inflation, and a slowing economy, the three essential credit metrics – probabilities of default (POD), POD rate of change, and POD volatility- have all materially increased from 2022. In this article, we look at what is happening at the state level, look at 30 common industries where…

We have used the term “second-order thinking” in our writings, and some bankers were curious about what exactly we mean. The term came to popularity in banking after Howard Marks wrote his seminal work on investments – The Most Important Thing. The “most important thing,” as described in the book, is the ability to drill…

This month, we rolled out “Tate,” our generative AI chatbot driven by ChatGPT that was designed to increase the productivity of our employees and allow us to become familiar with large language models. It’s been two weeks since its introduction, and we have already learned more than we bargained for. As one of the first…

Last week we spoke to a $1.2B community bank management team. The CLO was lamenting how he was losing quality loans and deposits to three aggressive national banks in the territory. An example was a $1.95mm owner-occupied CRE loan, where the borrower had multiple operating accounts totaling almost $500k. While this community bank is not…

Last week (HERE), we looked at how deposit account tiering is used, some of the objectives that banks might employ, and the effectiveness of tiering in total. As discussed last week, many banks tier without objective, without data, and without supportive marketing, thus rendering the methodology worthless and possibly hurtful. We challenged several commonly held…