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Bank Director’s 2026 RankingBanking study (HERE), sponsored by Crowe and compiled by Piper Sandler & Co. using S&P Global Market Intelligence data, ranks the 300 largest publicly traded U.S. banks on 2025 results. This year’s headline finding may look like a focus on net interest margin: the top 25 banks posted a median net interest…

Last week, we presented peer group analysis with a free tool banks can use to compare themselves against others. We also provided a methodology for doing that. In case you missed it, be sure to go HERE. In this article, we want to highlight one other issue that we touched on but didn’t explore in…

Grid-based pricing is typically used to set the applicable margin of a loan based on performance measures such as credit rating or cash flow coverage.  But the same concept can be pointed at a different target: deposit balances.  The average commercial borrower focuses more on their cost of borrowing and less on return on deposits…

One of the most common mistakes that bankers make is benchmarking their institution against the wrong peer group. Many management teams spend hours discussing how their net interest margin (NIM) compares to the industry average, whether their efficiency ratio is above or below peers, or how deposit growth stacks up against other banks. The problem…

We were recently collaborating with a community banker who was trying to win a relationship client from a regional bank. The issue was that the incumbent bank was pricing this client at a credit spread of 1.25% over SOFR and our client banker was told that his bank would not accept less than 2.40% credit…

Its World Cup mania and creating a model to predict the winner is excellent training for bankers looking to forecast their deposit run off in the future. In this article, we take bankers through a step-by-step process of “vibe modeling” a World Cup model and then apply it to modeling future deposit run off due…

We might have a divided Congress. Pundits, economists, and the market provide economic forecasts such as GDP, interest rates, inflation, consumer and business demand, loan default rates and banks’ cost of funds.  Unfortunately, people overestimate their competence even in areas where they possess experience and knowledge.  Market forecasts represent the sum of all actors expressing…

During the pandemic, some banks extended asset duration as if they were convinced that interest rates would not rise again in the future. At that time, we published multiple articles warning banks to dynamically assess their asset-liability management (ALM) assumptions and consider alternative paths of interest rates; paths that looked normal just before the pandemic….

Now that we have complete call report data, the banking industry unveils some tidbits of knowledge that has an impact on every bank’s positioning and strategy. In this article, we recap the major trends of the quarter and discuss what it means for a data-driven, strategically focused bank management team. The Backdrop for Bank Performance…

In our previous article (HERE) we discussed differences between how various banks price commercial loans. We contrasted ideal pricing and real-world pricing strategies employed by banks. We highlighted the objectives of loan pricing and summarized seven tools that community banks can use to price commercial loan relationships. In this article, we would like to further…

Annually we study community banks’ performance to investigate which financial variables correlate to Bank ROA. We then explain that correlative relationship using further studies, analysis, and industry observations. We use average five-year ROA and measure the correlation coefficient (R2) for various financial variables. Over the years the relationship between NIM and ROA has been remarkably…

Now that we have all the 2025 data for the banking industry, we spent some time working with Amberoon, sifting through the data, the trends, and the insights to produce a dashboard and in-depth report on almost every community bank in the U.S. Beyond metrics, this is our first iteration (now in beta form) of…