Correspondent Blog

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…

The art and science of optimized deposit gathering is a declining skill set among bankers. Banking schools don’t teach it, conferences don’t showcase it, and internal bank educators no longer train in the discipline. It is ironic as no other banking endeavor can build long-term franchise value like deposit gathering. Further, deposit gathering and its…

Many banks work hard to have a low-cost deposit base only to undermine their efforts. One of the biggest mistakes bank make when pricing deposits is advertising an above-market rate, thereby shortening deposit duration and increasing negative convexity for that one account and the whole product offering. This subtle distinction might be lost on many…

In a previous article (HERE), we analyzed industry performance and demonstrated that the average five-year net interest margin (NIM) and return on assets (ROA) are unrelated.  The correlation coefficient (R2) between these two variables is NEGATIVE 0.02 (essentially no explanatory relationship).  This lack of connection has been a general observation in the banking industry for…

Despite reaching the highest profitability in over a decade in 2022, US banks overall trade at a discount to other sectors as measured by P/E or P/Book, and approximately 53% of US banks have earned less than their cost of equity over the last five years. The high profitability for banks in 2022 was propelled…

As interest rates go back up and volatility continues to remain high, banks’ cost of capital has undergone a significant shift up. Your cost of capital is essential to know for several reasons. Mostly, it gives your board and shareholders a yardstick in which to gauge a bank’s return. Produce over your cost, and you…

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….

A couple of weeks ago, we delved into the origination and operating costs of manufacturing commercial loans (HERE). In this article, we delve into deposit profitability and highlight the cost structure of deposits. The goal here is to give bankers that don’t utilize a funds transfer pricing and activity analysis methodology a glimpse into the…

Most financial institutions never see the actual cost of originating their products. To do so would require at least a rudimentary funds transfer pricing methodology, and many banks have not invested the time to derive a workable framework. Understanding a product’s cost structure is the first step towards accurate pricing and, more importantly, process improvement….

A common strategy for community banks, when faced with a borrower that wants a 10-year fixed rate loan, is to offer a five-year fixed rate that adjusts in five years. Historically, this has worked for some customers and banks because, over the last 40 years, five-year rates have generally fallen.  As interest rates fall, a…