Correspondent Blog

Yours might be the case of the emperor lacking clothes. While many banks are helping their clients with employee retention credits (ERC) (If you are not, see HERE), many banks with 500 employees or less still need to collect their OWN ERC rebates. During the pandemic, most banks retained their employees and suffered higher costs,…

Many community banks are searching for ways to increase fee income, and many bank CEOs have concluded that fee income is a significant driver of revenue and profitability.  We argue that larger banks do not have an inherent advantage over community banks in generating fee income because of their scale.  Most fee income generated by…

Historically, community banks have relied on net interest margin (NIM) instead of fee income to drive return on equity (ROE). In contrast, larger banks have emphasized non-interest income rather than NIM to boost ROE and revenue. For example, 40% of JP Morgan’s commercial banking revenue is derived from fee income, and JP Morgan’s commercial banking…

If you ever wanted to know the most popular strategic planning initiative for a bank over the last three years, it is this one – generate more non-interest income. An estimated 30% of banks have this as their focus. The funny part is that despite this being a major conversation and the source of many…