Correspondent Blog

If managing loan pricing is a college-level course, deposit pricing is a master’s. Given the complexity, managing analyzed checking, however, is a PhD. level effort. There are all the dynamics of traditional accounts plus often two different interest rates, the ability to offset fees, and a variety of adjustments. We covered the basics of account…

Data analytics combined with artificial intelligence is changing the strategy and tactics around account analysis and the analyzed checking account (which we will call a “transaction account”). In this two-part series, we want to explore the history, structure, and role of account analysis in Part 1 and then some insights and tactics on increasing bank…

Unfortunately, bank product pricing is essentially an afterthought in our industry. Few bankers study bank pricing, and few apply quantitative rigor to pricing optimization. We often price products and services without regard to cost, we price small loans against competition that also has pricing wrong, and we pay little attention to our products’ perceived value…

Not all customers are created equal. Some customers are more profitable than others, and if you are out to build a more profitable bank, it pays to have a tactical plan to go after more profitable customers. The treasury or cash management customer is usually a bank’s most profitable customer on a risk-adjusted basis (HERE). …

If one product is the future of banking, it is treasury management. With a competitive offering, it will be easier to attract the small business and mid-sized companies that a bank needs to fuel its core growth. In this article, we detail the five steps to building a treasury management strategy, provide some tools to…

Seasoned bankers call it “The Distributor Tactic,” and it is a little-discussed technique used for ages in banking to speed up the sales cycle to land commercial bank deposits and treasury management accounts faster. The key to this tactic is to know that very few commercial checking customers utilize any medium or high-value treasury management…

Next week, FedNow goes live, ushering in the next era of faster payments. Some 57 financial institutions will start with FedNow, including about 42 banks (plus a handful of core systems providers and fintechs). FedNow joins The Clearing House, which has offered real-time payments (RTP®) for the last five years. Banks are about to win…

It was back in 2014 when researchers at DeepMind directed their nascent artificial intelligence application to the game Breakout. Instead of programming DeepMind on how to play the game, the researchers programmed DeepMind to learn about learning to play the game. That is a meta-level that isn’t normally programmed, but the result of that effort,…

Bank payments are a mess. Every payment method is a different channel. Worse yet, we confuse our customers with different forms, procedures, and jargon. It has been 50 years and we still expect our customers to know the difference between a wire and an ACH. If we can’t talk to customers about it right, we…