Who Do You Call?

The board of Community First Bankshares has always prided itself on being proactive, something attributable to the experience level of its directors. Several have done stints as top executives with other financial services companies; most have served on other boards. So when two directors suggested last fall that the Fargo, North Dakota-based company’s board conduct […]

Pity Duane Kropuenske. At a time when scandal and a sluggish economy have made root-canal work seem more appealing than serving as a corporate director, Kropuenske was recently burdened with filling out an entire board roster for his privately held start-up, Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minnesota. Or maybe not. Despite the dire, sky-is-falling warnings […]

Not long ago, accounting was a profession only a bean counter could love. Now, thanks to the corporate scandals that led to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, banks see their external auditors as more important partners than ever before. Today, banks face the increased filing requirements of the new legislation, in addition […]

Bankers get perks like company cars and theater tickets, not billions of shares of stock,” says Paul Dorf, a managing director at New Jersey-based Compensation Resources, Inc. “We’ve all heard the Enron and WorldCom stories that the media love to harp on, but we haven’t seen those types of compensation excesses within the banking industry.” […]

When it’s time to shop for directors and officers liability insurance, buyer beware. Not only do financial institutions need to swallow hefty premium hikes, they face lower coverage limits, higher deductibles, new restrictions, and a tougher application process. “You have to be very careful you are getting the same coverage,” says William Brown Jr., a […]

Thomas Vartanian, a lawyer who counsels banks on risk management, likes to recall the story of two tugboats. On March 10, 1928, the vessels Hooper and Montrose, en route to New York from Virginia, were struggling off the New Jersey coast, each carrying three barges of coal. They never made it. Easterly gales overcame the […]

Is it any wonder that most bankers today feel as though they’re trapped in a Ray Charles ballad about rainy nights in Georgia? The sluggish U.S. economy has cut the demand for business loans, while declining interest rates have trimmed the returns on most securities—resulting in the worst margin squeeze for banks in years. “I […]

Like it or not, banks have been conscripted to the front lines of the government’s “war on terror,” having been assigned the duty of helping to identify terrorists and disrupting their financial networks. It’s an awesome responsibility, and even some of the best-run banks are having a tough time living up to regulatory expectations. Many […]

While this year’s pace for mergers and acquisitions is hardly record breaking, several factors are luring banks back to the negotiating table, signaling a possible end to the recent lull. For one, acquisitive banks in years past may be awakening from their relative hibernation. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. announced in May a deal […]

In the past 20 years, history has proven conclusively that when a bank merger fails, it’s usually for one of two reasons—the acquirer either paid too much, or it botched the integration of the acquired bank’s technology after the deal was done. The pace of banking industry consolidation has slowed considerably in recent years, taking […]

For years, observers of Hawaii’s banking market have speculated over a potential merger between CB Bancshares Inc. and rival Central Pacific Financial Corp. Similar-size institutions, both were founded by Japanese-Americans in the aftermath of World War II and are considered lenders of choice for Honolulu’s small- and mid-size business market. In 1999, the two sides […]

Back in the wild and woolly 1990s, when consolidation of the U.S. banking industry resembled the Oklahoma land grab, the strategy du jour was to grow through acquisition—a phenomenon that created several large banking companies with extensive retail networks. These days banks are again expanding their franchises, but this time they’re using a very different […]

When Atlanta-based Main Street Banks acquired another bank in northern Georgia last December, it naturally had to pay the piper. If it had made this acquisition a few years ago, Main Street probably would have funded its $96 million purchase of First Colony Bancshares entirely with stock. But equity capital is expensive nowadays compared to […]

The Internet today is no longer an option in banking; it has evolved into a critical component of every bank’s strategy for delivering financial services and an important tool for enhancing operational efficiencies. For a community bank that wants to enhance its e-banking presence, there are plenty of options.