Correspondent Blog

If you are conducting bank strategy or marketing around demographic information, at best you are being lazy and ineffective. At worst, you are being sexist, ageist and a bunch of other names that can hurt your culture and reputation while wasting your marketing budget. In this age of data, getting to the Holy Grail of…

Should borrowers pay commercial loan points to lower future interest payments? Loan or mortgage points are upfront fees paid by the borrower to the lender to reduce the interest rate on a loan or mortgage.  For example, assume that a borrower is considering a loan, structured as a 25-year amortization, due in ten years, at…

As we near the final stages of strategic planning and budgeting, several bank technology trends are emerging that will play out over the next several years. This list isn’t necessarily for bank technologists but for business line executives who make decisions on products and services. In this article, we highlight these investments, put them in…

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York published three articles on why banks fail (the first one here).  While the aim of the research was to identify the cause of approximately 5,000 US bank failures over the course of 160 years, the research also infers what factors bank executes can influence to not only avoid…

Bankers love easy. Who doesn’t want an easy way to have a more profitable bank? We also love to keep things simple. It is a common refrain. Compounding the problem is that in banking, we often think that “simple” and “easy” as synonymous. In this article, we will touch on innovation, technology and banking strategy…

In our previous article (here), we made the argument that the next administration’s agenda is highly inflationary, will likely lead to higher interest rates and more volatility.  We estimate a high probability that after this current interest rate cutting cycle, which may end sometime in 2025, that higher inflation will result in the Federal Reserve…

With almost 30% of banks utilizing some portion of instant payments, the industry is starting to gather more data on how instant payments impact balances, customer acquisition, and account usage. Instant payments have the potential to change the payment landscape for banks. In this article, we look at seven ways instant payments impact deposit performance…

The Trump administration’s impact on the US economy has been thoroughly analyzed and will continue to be debated (and closely watched) for its entire four-year term.  Economic scenarios may unfold in a myriad of unexpected ways.  However, one result of the administrations stated policies will be highly likely – we estimate at least a 90%…

The spectacle that is Money 20/20 (Money 2020 or M2020) went down last week, and it did not disappoint. Money 2020 is likely the conference with the lowest conference-attendee-to-session-attendee ratio in the industry. While the sessions were interesting,  the heart of the conference is all about sales, partnerships, and deal-making. In this respect, 2024 was…

Over the last few years we have published various articles on the pros and cons of commercial loan prepayment provisions, how those prepay provisions impact marketing and sales, loan prepayment speeds, and the relationship between prepayment provisions and customer return on equity (ROE) (some of the recent articles are here, here, and here).  We are…

A survey from the CFA Institute caught our attention on why wealth management clients leave. 47% of the respondents said they left because of the poor portfolio performance. That makes sense. But, do you know what the second highest reason for leaving your wealth manager was? Communication. 43% of the respondents left because of the…

In our previous article (here) we analyzed the data on community bank M&A and performance, and we concluded that there is no relationship between community bank size and profitability, as measured by return on equity (ROE).  While superficially it makes sense that bigger is better, size itself does not lead to better bank performance.  Combining…