Correspondent Blog

How does a commercial loan’s maturity and amortization impact credit? Many credit officers would prefer to set shorter maturities for loan repayment terms.  The logic is that it is better for the bank to control the credit with a hard stop and revisit credit appetite at shorter intervals.  If credit conditions are appropriate, the bank…

If your bank is interested in banking more profitable commercial relationships – those customers with multiple bank products, where the bank holds over 50% of bank wallet, provides long-term sticky banking services and recognizes over 20% return on equity (ROE) – then the case study described in this article will be of interest to you. …

We conducted a loan performance analysis for over 5,000 individual hedged commercial loans originated by almost 400 community and regional banks across the country. We measured prepayment speeds, loan size, loan term, fee income, loan yield, credit performance, and return on equity (ROE) of hedged loans and compared this performance to community bank industry averages….

Optionality is defined as a state in which choice or discretion is allowed. In finance, optionality is an asset (has value) for the person who can exercise the option, while the person who gave the option has the liability.  Selling options for above their value can be a profitable business for banks and brokers, but…

The average return on equity (ROE) for the banking industry declined to 11.10% in Q1/24 (a 23 percent decline in the last year). For banks under $10B in assets, ROE declined to 10.53% in Q1/24 (an 11% decline in the last year). The typical published analysis considers the industry in aggregate which conflates the challenges…

In last week’s article (here), we discussed why category and geographic diversification may be unfeasible for many community banks.  We concluded that after a community bank sets limits on loan categories, the added benefit of geographic or loan category diversification is nullified.  We discussed three main reasons why community bank diversification by geography and loan…

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…

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…

One of the lessons that was driven home at the recent American Banker Small Business Banking Conference in Nashville was the difference in marketing between large national banks and community banks, particularly deposit marketing. Most national and regional banks allocate marketing resources to recently acquired customers to get them to build deposit balances and purchase…

Community banks are striving to increase loan yield and maintain their cost of funding (COF).  Unfortunately, pressure on COF is expected to remain, and loans will reprice slower than expected as borrowers with below-market rates will wait until the last maturity day to refinance their credits.  We have created and used a novel structure to…

Grid-based pricing is typically used to set the applicable margin of a loan based on specific performance measures, such as credit rating or cash flow coverage.  However, grid-based pricing can also be used to increase deposit balances.  The average borrower does not calculate their cost of borrowing and return on deposits on the economic value…

Many banks pride themselves on superior customer service, and approximately 90% of all community banks believe that they provide an above-average level of customer service (the math cannot work that way).  The reason bankers should want to provide an above-average level of service is to increase profitability, which translates to charging customers more in the…