Correspondent Blog

As fans of the hit Apple TV psychological thriller Severance know, one of the jobs of severed Lumon employees is to find the numbers that elicit negative emotions and make them disappear. Similarly, bankers must do the same thing when dealing with asset-liability management (ALM). This article examines how running multiple bank simulations can help…

To ring in and celebrate the New Year, check up on your bank’s future financial health. Based on the 2007 to 2010 bank failure experience, we modeled the financial health of every bank using the last 16 quarters of historical performance.  We have also created projections for the next 18 months. Each bank has an…

Community banks (under $10B in assets) serve a key role for borrowers, local communities, and the broader US economy. Community banks are better positioned than many other creditors to follow and adapt to local economies, industries and trends, thereby, being better stewards of capital.  Community banks may also serve as buffers for the extreme swings…

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…

Your bank is likely full of silos. Deposits rarely coordinate with Loans, Loans seldom talk to Mortgage, Risk is often on the outside looking in, and no one talks to Marketing until it is too late. These silos frequently prevent executing a single strategy, hinder communication, and interfere with collaboration. As a result, banks often…

It has long frustrated us that our industry has no aggregate banking calendar. That is, there is no single place to see all the banking conferences, workshops, symposiums, and conventions (we will use the generic “conference”) in the banking industry. If you are trying to budget for next year, train yourself, train your people, prospect,…

S&P Global’s annual Community Banking Conference (CBC) should be on every executive banker’s agenda. This banking conference is designed to highlight top performing banks, their strategies and tactics. The 2024 conference covered a wide range of topics that matter and has the highest ratio of top-performing banks to attendees of any conference in the industry….

The “Three-Body Problem,” currently made popular by our new favorite author, Cixin Liu, is the concept of instability when three similar-sized celestial objects interact. The problem is currently unsolvable. Banking has a similar physics problem when management juggles strategy, risk/profitability, and customer behavior. This article will discuss the challenge of managing three potentially opposing forces…

Now that 1Q is in the books, if you are a public bank, you may have an earnings call coming up in some form. We want to better prepare you and get you ready for bank earnings call questions. To do that, we wrote a Python script to analyze a representative sample of earnings call…

Ask a banker about the value of their bank, and they will either talk about some derivation of book value or earnings multiple. While these bankers are not wrong, they are not exactly right. While both valuation methods provide everyone with a nice, tidy sum of value, the data could be more actionable. You might…

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…