Correspondent Blog

With almost 30% of banks utilizing some portion of instant payments, the industry is starting to gather more data on how instant payments impact balances, customer acquisition, and account usage. Instant payments have the potential to change the payment landscape for banks. In this article, we look at seven ways instant payments impact deposit performance…

You oversee pricing your checking accounts and you are trying to decide between $10.00 per month, $9.99, or $9.95. Which one do you choose? In a prior article where we tested “charm” account pricing, where we showed that conversion rates were almost twice as high when we used a $1.99 price point for a product…

As a general statement, banks offer too many options for certificates of deposits (CDs). Consider that the average bank offers 12 different maturities, some “specials,” plus several different tiers of pricing within each maturity. We have seen banks with as many as 42 different CD options which is inefficient for every party. The problem is…

Because of the option to add or remove deposit balances over time, deposit management is one of the more complicated endeavors in banking. Lending, by comparison, is largely a one dimensional supply vs. demand problem. Building better deposit performance is more complicated. Add a three month CD option for your customers and the duration of…

Deposit costs and liquidity remain a challenge for some community banks as competition for core funding remains intense.  The graph below compares the liquidity ratio for community banks (under $10B in assets) and banks over $100B in assets.  The average difference in liquidity is stark, but for many community banks the issue is translating to…

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…

If you want to grab a material amount of new deposit balance, offer a 5.05% money market rate, post it all over Instagram, and sit back and watch the money roll in. This approach has many problems, the first of which is a negative return on your investment (ROI). You will also end up cannibalizing…

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…