Correspondent Blog

For any business to succeed, managers need to understand their competitive landscape. What the competition is offering, delivery channels, pricing methods, and service levels helps community banks differentiate their offering and enhance their competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the competitive analysis for the broadly defined banking industry is challenging to understand because of the rapid innovation in…

Community banks have solid competitive advantages when competing against insurance companies (primarily life insurance companies or “Lifecos”) and commercial real estate securitization conduit lenders (CMBS) for commercial borrowers. Unfortunately, some bankers are not positioning their services correctly to explain why borrowers should do business with their community bank. Some bankers even use fatalistic arguments that…