Pivoting to Offense to Endure the Covid-19 Economy

Banks must plan for the economic conditions looming on the other side of Covid-19.

Banks must simultaneously figure out how to weather the public health crisis and serve their clients in almost entirely remote environments while preserving their financial health for months of economic uncertainty. The depth and longevity of this crisis requires banks to strategically reassess the immediate negative impacts, project probabilities of further disruption and re-engineer their delivery models.

We believe that the banks that take bold and decisive action around these key issues will emerge from this period with more-durable relationships, greater agility and resilience, steeper market growth and better profitability compared to their peers. Banks should prioritize a set of five stabilizing actions that will set the stage for resilience in any potential downturn. 

Help Customers Confront the Crisis
Adversity contains implicit opportunity for customer outreach. Banks should contact customers to communicate that their bank is open and available for support. They should devise strategic outreach programs to solidify customer confidence and build long-term relationships.

Banks should then immediately focus on helping customers find ways to ease cash flow constraints and shortfalls in working capital and liquidity reserves. They should consider relief programs and creative, beneficial adjustments to loan structures such as permitting deferred payments, interest-only payments, re-amortizing payments or waiving select fees. Aligning their clients’ new needs with bank solutions and products will establish a foundation for post-crisis revenue growth.

Surgical Expense Reductions
Often, the immediate reaction during economic turmoil is to cut staff without strategic approach. While this can lower costs by the next financial period, this approach fails to strategically position the bank for post-downturn recovery and risks misaligned skill-sets or understaffing.

We recommend that banks understand which levers can be strategically pulled to quickly reduce costs. These levers range from identifying and evaluating paper-based processes, robotic process automation and aligning operations and personnel to the revised sales volume estimates. There are significant cost savings available even in credit risk management – simply by optimizing credit processes and better leveraging data.

Credit Risk Management Tailored to the Crisis
Banks had no visibility into the recession, and must assess not only the immediate impact on borrower financial and implied repayment performances but also the delayed impact on various segments of the economy. Ensure your risk management strategy reflects the new credit reality:

• Consider proactively managing the portfolio renewal cycle by implementing mass short-term extensions on lines of credit, re-evaluating credit policy exception limits and increasing monitoring through frequently conversations with borrowers.
• Leverage data to scale the identification of emerging portfolio risk and related triggers.
• Consider creating a Covid-19 financial health assessment to facilitate financial relief and to identify potential credit downgrades.
• Assess industry-based impacts on your portfolio to predict deteriorating credits in order to right-size loan loss reserves.
• Increase the frequency and detail of credit monitoring procedures for sectors that have been immediately impacted and those that will be impacted in the near term.

Align Resources with Client Need
Changes in spending will impact the creditworthiness of many loan applicants, so banks must take a hard look at realistic expectations for new business goals in 2020 and 2021. Realign banker-relationship manager priorities and shift from new business development with prospective customers to selling deeper into the existing portfolio, where possible. Client engagement will enable banks to manage risk while providing the client with much-needed attention, solutions and assistance.

It will also be critical to scale up certain operational functions quickly to meet shifting client demand. Realigning  branch staff to handle call center volume and line resources to assist with spiking credit action volumes allow you to redeploy and scale your workforce to the new reality.

Create a Balanced Remote Workplace Strategy
Banks must leverage all available tools not just to maintain, but further, customer relationships and generate new business activity where possible. Empower customers to make deposits digitally by providing remote deposit capture hardware and services and consider waiving a portion of RDC equipment or service fees for a trial period.

Proactively run and distribute bank statement reports through digitally secure methods, rather than requiring customers to create and distribute these reports. Collaborate with bank customers to send check payable files to the bank for check printing and distribution.

We believe a bank’s actions in the next 90 days are vital to the survival, sustainability and long-term positioning for regrowth. Responding to customers with needed outreach sets the stage for new levels of customer loyalty. Shifting the bank’s focus inward toward operations with a keen focus on streamlining processes, proactively changing procedures and aligning the right people to the right tasks will ultimately lead to both a sustained and improved financial ecosystem.