Correspondent Blog

There have been many a banker who has said they want to offer a high-yield account because the “higher interest expense is just like paying marketing costs.” This banker may even be thinking of starting a completely new digital bank using a high-yield account as its flagship product. The logic that “rate sells itself” is…

The 2024 annual Consumer Banking Association conference (CBA Live) took place in Washington, D.C., over three days last week. Overarching topics (by word count and sentiment) include the imperative for greater consumer protection, the required more significant effort to fight fraud, rapid innovation (particularly in A.I.), and the need to keep evolving your workforce. We…

We have discussed the importance of bundling or packaging deposit account services to speed up customer choices, increase profitability, and enhance deposit performance. However, many banks still offer just two choices, whereas if they offered three, they would increase profitability. In this article, we examine how behavioral deposit pricing works and how to use it…

Maybe you saw Oppenheimer over the weekend, maybe it was Barbie, or perhaps you did the “Barbenheimer” thing and did both. Maybe you opted for Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part I. No matter your choice, there was a clear winner: Barbie. Film quality aside, there have been few movies in the history of the…

Community bank cost of funds is jumping up. As shown in the graph below, the net interest margin (NIM) for community banks declined 22bps in Q1’23.  Most of that NIM erosion is the result of a sharply higher cost of funding earning assets (COF). The question is – what will happen to community bank’s cost…

Last week (HERE), we looked at how deposit account tiering is used, some of the objectives that banks might employ, and the effectiveness of tiering in total. As discussed last week, many banks tier without objective, without data, and without supportive marketing, thus rendering the methodology worthless and possibly hurtful. We challenged several commonly held…

Adjusting pricing for deposit tiering according to account size is essentially a tradition in banking. A typical bank’s money market accounts often have six tiers ranging from $2,000 to $100,000. The question that always comes up is whether you have suitable tiers and the correct number of tiers. Are you using your tiers to drive…

Banking has now arrived at a speed that it cannot handle. While there have always been problems in banks’ asset-liability models (ALM) and liquidity stress test models, the current environment exacerbates this problem. Recent bank failures hurting public perceptions, the current market trends of higher rates, Quantitative Tightening, digital banking, social media, and a flight…

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…

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…

It was the famous England vs. France chess match back in 1834, where the French opened with a simple yet potent attack. England came out, moving a pawn to the center of the board. The French stopped the pawn’s advance and used the combination of their bishop, rook, and knights to counterattack England’s exposed players….

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…