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…

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…

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…

Adjusting pricing for deposit tiering according to account size is essentially a tradition in banking. A typical bank’s money market accounts often have six tiers ranging from $2,000 to $100,000. The question that always comes up is whether you have suitable tiers and the correct number of tiers. Are you using your tiers to drive…

Focusing on uninsured deposit performance is a hot topic among investors, analysts, and regulators. The concern is grounded in data as higher balance accounts are more interest rate and risk-sensitive than lower balance accounts. While every bank is now tracking the general metric, only a few banks monitor deposit performance in the category. That is…

Banking has now arrived at a speed that it cannot handle. While there have always been problems in banks’ asset-liability models (ALM) and liquidity stress test models, the current environment exacerbates this problem. Recent bank failures hurting public perceptions, the current market trends of higher rates, Quantitative Tightening, digital banking, social media, and a flight…

In the quest for deposits, one successful tactic at top-performing banks is to target the right types of customers. While desiring to bank everyone in your community is noble, it can be a poor use of resources. Some customers offer better returns because they use more banking services and have more deposit balances. Not to…

You have undoubtedly heard or seen the various commercials and likely have even received phone calls about Employee Retention Credit, or ERC. The need for a known, reliable brand creates an excellent opportunity for community banks to help small business customers while building deposit balances. We introduced our ERC Assist program several months ago so…

In our industry, many banks need to put more thought into the science and strategy of deposit promotions. This is, unfortunately, occurring as the number of deposit promotions is approaching a near-term high, and banks are throwing away money like an untargeted ad campaign. Not leveraging media, not having a current deposit pricing strategy, not…

You can always tell a good banker by the way they handle their deposits. With loans, it’s hard to discern expert-level skills unless you know the market and the credit. Deposits, however, are pure. When we analyze a bank, it is typically the first thing we look for, as deposit pricing and structure are the…

Last week we highlighted the lessons that machine learning taught us about the Unified Deposit Formula (HERE). Embodied in the Unified Deposit Formula is a marketing and amplification equation. In this article, we expand on the lessons we learned from artificial intelligence regarding raising deposits and explore how we can better use the Formula, and…

If you are looking for insight into how artificial intelligence can help in banking, we give you the Unified Deposit Formula that can be used for raising deposits. Before using machine learning, we, like most bankers, thought about deposit pricing along a single dimension – price and sensitivity. However, it turns out that price and…