February 2014

Using Webinars For Bank Marketing

Webinars at Banks

In banking, it takes six to twelve “touches” to a potential customer before you can convert them to a full blown customer. One of the best ways we have found of segmenting and qualifying a customer is to hold a webinar. The webinar is an efficient way to start discussing a topic with a wide number of customers that are just entering the sales funnel. While most webinars from community banks are product related, we have found success, and encourage other community banks, to hold webinars on topics where the bank can become a local thought leader.

Should You Add Business Payroll Services To Your Treasury Management Offerings?

Bank Payroll Services

As loan growth picks up at banks, we see more attention turning to gathering low cost, high duration deposits. One of the best ways to do this is through grabbing the operating account at businesses. One of the best ways to get the operating account is to offer an online, low cost set of payroll services. This is why the offering of online payroll services is picking up for community banks.

The Simple Risk Assessment Template – Hedging Example

Risk Assessment

In this age of enterprise risk management, a new product or process risk assessment is mandatory. A good risk assessment looks at any new effort from a variety of angles and tries to quantify the unmitigated risk. While a risk assessment is an important step in protecting current operations, it is also the place to understand the opportunity cost of not offering the product and the potential revenue that the new effort or procedure will bring to the Bank.

 

Want To Increase Bank Sales? Pick Better Customers

Bank Sales

Last week we had a healthy internal debate over the value of municipal customers. When it comes to profitability, municipal customers are either very profitable or not very profitable – there is really not much in the middle. In other words, municipal profitability does not follow a normal distribution and as such, you have to choose your municipal customers wisely.

The Science Behind Bank Email Signatures

Bank email signatures

Well, it finally happened - On the verge of being a $4 billion asset-sized bank when yesterday we got the memo that everyone in the bank is now required to use a standard email signature. While some employees might look at this as a corporate intrusion into their lives because they can no longer have the witty quote at the bottom, it is the right thing to do. Corporate email signatures are so easy to do well, yet they are often done poorly.

Are You Taking This Into Account For Your Floating Rate Loan Portfolio?

Loan Portfolio Management

Your floating rate loan portfolio may be ready to hurt you, and your bank might not be aware. Unlike fixed rate loans, floating rate loans tend not to have prepayment provisions. This part is well understood. What is far less understood is the fact that ANY material rate movement ends up hurting performance. While we have written about how interest rate risk and credit are interrelated, today we focus how rate movement causes unaware community banks to be adversely selected, thereby hurting performance.

 

Five Reasons To Come To Our BMC Conference

Bank Conference

Our 2014 Bank Management Conference is coming up on July 10 – 13, 2014, in Amelia Island, Florida and we will have detailed information coming soon.  We can tell you that you don’t want to miss it for 5 very important reasons:

 

5. Due diligence – You get to meet our whole team in person and see what we are about. This is just good risk management – forget the fact that it just happens to be on the beach at one of the best hotel’s in the world.

 

How to Make Sure Your Liability Duration is Real

Liability management

Many banks have their certificates of deposits modeled on their asset-liability systems without optionality. That is, they treat the final maturity as gospel with little weight given towards repayment.  This could be a mistake, as just assuming the forward curve is accurate, CD’s are set to exhibit about a 20% shorter duration than modeled. In a rising rate environment, banks are short the option value of a CD and thus are exposed to a market loss in the form of opportunity cost should the investor redeem early.