Correspondent Blog

It is counterintuitive that you might want to advise borrowers to do a loan refinancing at this stage of the interest rate cycle.  The FOMC has raised short-term interest rates by 3.75% in the eight months between March and November.  The market is now forecasting an additional 1.25% in hikes by early next year.  Borrowers…

Almost every bank has some form of “human capital management” in its top three challenges for the coming years. Attracting, acquiring, retaining, and training talent should be the cornerstone of any bank’s strategic effort as “people” indeed are our most valuable asset and far exceed the value of loans, deposits, and financial capital. This article…

Available-for-sale securities are reported at fair value, and any unrealized gains and losses are included in accumulated other comprehensive income (AOCI) in the equity section of the balance sheet.  The AOCI is an accounting adjustment meant to reflect the economic value of assets and is the process of “marking loans to market.”  That same adjustment…

This week the FOMC increased the Fed Funds rate by 75 bps, as expected to the 3.75% to 4.00% target range. The Effective Fed Funds rate jumped up and should stabilize at 3.83%, as did the 1-month term SOFR, to 3.79%.  The futures market now expects close to average odds of a 75bps increase in…

Our teams just returned from back-to-back weeks at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando and Money 20/20 in Las Vegas. Gartner focused on technology infrastructure, while Money 20/20 was around fintech and payments. Every day we walked 8+ miles, talked to countless vendors, sat through PowerPoints, had our share of EDM piped into our ears, and…

Help us, help you. It is budget and strategic planning season, and many banks have asked for this data in order to help calibrate their bank. We are asking about your expected budgets, views on the economy, prospects for growth, and the most significant challenges. We are looking for your thoughts on the future of…

In the last 12 months, the Federal Reserve went from arguing that inflation was a transitory phenomenon to raising interest rates to fight runaway inflation by three percent in just six months.  The result is not only higher rates but the most severe interest rate hiking cycle in the past 35 years –  and it…

We covered various frameworks to “wow” your customer HERE. We covered why “Time-on-Task” (or the companion Customer Effort Score) is the ultimate metric in banking HERE. In this article, the last in the series, we give you seven rules to improve your bank. While these rules were derived from improving time-on-task, they can enhance bank…

In a previous article (HERE), we discussed the concept of Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP), why systemically important banks and large regional banks incorporate FTP, and why community banks should also consider implementing FTP.  We defined an FTP framework, the regulatory recommendation for FTP, and how FTP allows community banks to make better decisions about balance…

While “customer delight” is a worthy goal, few banks should focus on the concept. We covered various methodologies HERE. Instead of trying to “Wow” your customer, in this article, we present the “time-on-task metric” (and its companion, the Customer Effort Score (CES) framework) and detail not only why it matters but why it can change…

Funds transfer pricing (FTP) has been an essential tool for financial institutions for several decades.  FTP was introduced to banks in the early 1980s to help manage interest rate risk on a transactional basis.  FTP gained further focus after the 2007 financial crisis when financial firms failed partly because of the lack of funds transfer…

While we believe in “Wowing” your customers as a concept, we don’t believe in it as a strategic focus as a bank. The idea is too challenging to execute. However, we do believe that every banker should understand what “customer delight” (we will use interchangeably with “wowing”) quantitatively looks like so delight can be operationalized….