What We’ve Been Up To

Magazines are rarely just magazines anymore. More and more, they serve as the fulcrum for a broad array of services for their readers. Bank Director magazine, too, has evolved from a simple information source for bank directors to something more.

When we launched Bank Director more than a decade ago, the banking industry was largely regulated, savings and loans were in disarray, and the financial services industry hadn’t even been defined. Our job, as we saw it, was to make sense of all the change in the air, and to help bank boards do their job better.

That part of our mission hasn’t changed much. We still look for the issues that affect banks, we strain out those that don’t involve directors, and we try to interpret the issues in a way that helps board members make decisions. Some other things we’ve been up to:

For 10 years now, we’ve held an annual mergers and acquisitions conference for bankers. Next year’s Bank Director “Acquire or Be Acquired” conference will once again be held at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Feb. 8-10. All the primary investment bankers for bank M&A will be there. Many banks have sent their entire boards to this gathering, finding it a great way to plot the strategic future of their bank.

Our website, bankdirector.com, has been expanded greatly in scope and depth. In addition to finding archived articles from Bank Director, you’ll find all sorts of resources that provide guidance to running a board or a bank.

Our sister publication, Corporate Board Member, debuted in 1998, and is received by over 50,000 members of boards of public companies. If your bank is a listed public company, your directors are reading CBM as well as Bank Director.

Practically anything a board does these days has legal implications. Recognizing the need for better information on legal issues, Board Member Inc. began polling directors three years ago on their views of the very best corporate law firms in the country. Likewise, we held our first Fighting Shareholder Suits conference last November in New York. This event was of interest primarily to general counsel and CEOs whose jobs require them to prepare for the shareholder suits that have become an occupational hazard of the public company.

And that’s not all. The boom among banks in trust-preferred securities has led to conferences this spring on both coasts; our annual “What Directors Think” survey has become the gold standard of director surveys, receiving coverage in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal; in partnership with NASDAQ, Board Member Inc. has completed the first phase of its Board Governance Series of reports and webcasts; and our Academic Council is now in its third year, bringing leading academics together to discuss critical issues to boards.

We’re not done yet. If there are things you’d like to see us cover, let us know. That’s how our mission is defined, and that’s how our jobu00e2u20ac”like yoursu00e2u20ac”continues to expand and evolve.