Will Regulators’ Actions Stem Deposit Runs, Banking Crisis?

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Bank regulators rolled out several tools from their tool kit to try to stem a financial crisis this week, but problems remain. 

The joint announcements followed the Friday closure of Silicon Valley Bank and the surprise Sunday evening closure of Signature Bank. 

Santa Clara, California-based Silicon Valley Bank had $209 billion in assets and $175 billion in deposits at the end of 2022 and went into FDIC receivership on March 10; New York-based Signature Bank had $110 billion in assets and $88.6 billion in deposits at the end of 2022 and went into receivership on March 12. Both banks failed without an acquiring institution and the FDIC has set up bridge banks to facilitate their wind downs.

Bank regulators determined both closures qualified for “systemic risk exemptions” that allowed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to cover all the deposits for the failed banks. Currently, deposit insurance covers up to $250,000; both banks focused mainly on businesses, which carry sizable account balances. About 94% of Silicon Valley’s deposits were uninsured, and 90% of Signature’s deposits were over that threshold, according to a March 14 article from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The systemic risk exemption means regulators can act without Congressional approval in limited situations to provide insurance to the entire account balance, says Ed Mills, managing director of Washington policy at the investment bank Raymond James. 

The bank regulators also announced a special funding facility, which would help banks ensure they have access to adequate liquidity to meet the demands of their depositors. The facility, called the Bank Term Funding Program or BTFP, will offer wholesale funding loans with a duration of up to one year to eligible depository institutions that can pledge U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities and other qualifying assets as collateral. The combined measures attempt to stymie further deposit runs and solve for the issue that felled Silicon Valley and Signature: a liquidity crunch. 

In a normal operating environment, banks would sell bonds from their available-for-sale securities portfolio to keep up with liquidity demands, whether that’s deposit outflows or additional lending opportunities. Rising rates over the last five quarters means that aggregate unrealized losses in securities portfolios grew to $620 billion at the end of 2022 — losses many banks want to avoid recording. In the case of Silicon Valley, depositors began to pull their money after the bank announced on March 8 it would restructure its $21 billion available-for-sale securities portfolio, booking a $1.8 billion loss and requiring a $2 billion capital raise. 

“The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity [borrowed] against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress,” the Federal Reserve said in its release on the facility. Importantly, the pledged collateral, such as U.S. Treasurys, will be valued at par. That is the “most beneficial portion” of the program and eliminates the discount many of these securities carry given their lower yields, Mills says. 

The hope is that banks pledge their underwater bonds to increase their liquidity should deposits begin to leave their institution. One concern, then, is that banks hesitate to use it as a sign of weakness, Mills says. But he says, “conversations about impacts to earnings and impacts to reputation are secondary to solvency.”

Former Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig tells Bank Director that he appreciates the steps the regulators took, and of President Joe Biden’s messaging that accompanied Sunday’s actions. 

“I realized that for the regulators, because of the speed and the need to react quickly and over a weekend, there was a lot of wood to chop,” he says. “ It takes time, but I think they reacted with vigor.”

Although he wasn’t at the FDIC, Ludwig’s career touches on the importance of deposit coverage. In addition to serving as comptroller in the 1990s, he founded and later sold IntraFi, a reciprocal deposit network. He encourages banks to at least establish lines to the BTFP, since the application and transfers can take time.

It remains to be seen whether regulator actions will be enough to assuage depositors and the broader public. Banks have reportedly borrowed $11.9 billion from the new facility and another $152.8 billion from the discount window, according to a Bloomberg article published the afternoon of March 16. However, the facilities don’t fully address the problem that most banks are carrying substantial unrealized losses in their bond books — which may only continue to grow if the Federal Open Market Committee continues increasing rates.

“This announcement was about stemming the immediate systemic concerns, but it absolutely did not solve all of the banks’ woes,” Mills says.

It’s also possible that those tailored actions may be insufficient for certain institutions that resemble Silicon Valley Bank or Signature Bank. Clifford Stanford, an Atlanta-based partner of law firm Alston & Bird and a former assistant general counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, remembers how bank failures and weakness would come in waves of activity during the Great Recession and afterward. 

“There’s a lot of unknowns about who’s got what holes in their balance sheet and who’s sitting on what problems,” he says. “Every board of every bank should be asking their management right now: Do we have this problem? If we do have a risk, how are we hedging it? What sort of options do we have to backstop liquidity? What’s our plan?”

How to Attract Consumers in the Face of a Recession

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Fears of a recession in the United States have been growing.

For the first time since 2020, gross domestic product shrank in the first quarter according to the advance estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Ongoing supply chain issues have caused shortages of retail goods and basic necessities. According to a recent CNBC survey, 81% of Americans believe a recession is coming this year, with 76% worrying that continuous price hikes will force them to “rethink their financial choices.”

With a potential recession looming over the country’s shoulders, a shift in consumer psychology may be in play. U.S. consumer confidence edged lower in April, which could signal a dip in purchasing intention.

Bank leaders should proactively work with their marketing teams now to address and minimize the effect a recession could have on customers. Even in times of economic uncertainty, it’s possible to retain and build consumer confidence. Below are three questions that bank leaders should be asking themselves.

1. Do our current customers rate us highly?
Customers may be less optimistic about their financial situations during a recession. Whether and how much a bank can help them during this time may parlay into the institution’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).

NPS surveys help banks understand the sentiment behind their most meaningful customer experiences, such as opening new accounts or resolving problems with customer service. Marketing teams can use NPS to inform future customer retention strategies.

NPS surveys can also help banks identify potential brand advocates. Customers that rate banks highly may be more likely to refer family and friends, acting as a potential acquisition channel.

To get ahead of an economic slowdown, banks should act in response to results of NPS surveys. They can minimize attrition by having customer service teams reach out to those that rated 0 to 6. Respondents that scored higher (9 to 10) may be more suited for a customer referral program that rewards them when family and friends sign up.

2. Are we building brand equity from our customer satisfaction?
Banks must protect the brand equity they’ve built over the years. A two-pronged brand advocacy strategy can build customer confidence by rewarding customers with high-rated NPS response when they refer individual family and friends, as well as influencers who refer followers at a massive scale.

Satisfied customers and influencer partners can be mobilized through:

Customer reviews: Because nearly 50% of people trust reviews as much as recommendations from family, these can serve as a tipping point that turns window-shoppers into customers.

Trackable customer referrals: Banks can leverage unique affiliate tracking codes to track new applications by source, which helps identify their most effective brand advocates.

3. What problems could our customers face in a recession?
Banks vying to attract new customers during a recession must ensure their offerings address unique customer needs. Economic downturn affects customers in a variety of ways; banks that anticipate those problems can proactively address them before they turn into financial difficulties.

Insights from brand advocates can be especially helpful. For instance, a mommy blogger’s high referral rate may suggest that marketing should focus on millennials with kids. If affiliate links from the short video platform TikTok are a leading source of new customers, marketing teams should ramp up campaigns to reach Gen Z. Below are examples of how banks can act on insights about their unique customer cohorts.

Address Gen Z’s fear of making incorrect financial decisions: According to a Deloitte study, Gen Z fears committing to purchases and losing out on more competitive options. Bank marketers can encourage their influencer partners to create objective product comparison video content about their products.

Offer realistic home-buying advice to millennials: Millennials that were previously held back by student debt may be at the point in their lives where their greatest barrier to home ownership is easing. Banks can address their prospects for being approved for a mortgage, and how the federal interest rate hikes intersect with loan eligibility as well.

Engage Gen X and baby boomer customers about nest eggs:
Talks of recession may reignite fears from the financial crisis of 2007, where many saw their primary nest eggs – their homes — collapse in value. Banks can run campaigns to address these concerns and provide financial advice that protects these customers.

Banks executives watching for signs of a recession must not forget how the economic downturn impacts customer confidence. To minimize attrition, they should proactively focus on building up their brand integrity and leveraging advocacy from satisfied customers to grow customer confidence in their offerings.

Boardroom on Fire: A Bank Chairman’s Painful Lessons from the Financial Crisis

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chairman-4-9-19.png“A sheriff’s car pulls up—the bank is on lockdown.” David Butler wistfully recalls that day in 2009; the day he lost everything.

“It was pretty traumatic,” he admits. “You have to ask tough questions. Can we survive it? What do we do? What’s our exit strategy?”

The events that transpired that fateful Friday afternoon send shivers down the spines of every bank director—the worst case scenario. No, not a robbery. The other worst case scenario.

“The FDIC comes in. They lock the doors and secure all our records before anyone’s allowed to go home.”

Butler was a founding board member of Western Community Bank. Western was big, state-chartered and publicly-traded. In 2007, they acquired a chain of banks with a sizable chunk of money tied up in Florida real estate. It was a ticking time bomb—and, spoiler alert: it was about to go off.

The early fallout of the housing market crash saw Western hemorrhaging $6 million a quarter, making Butler’s board an easy target for regulators.

“The FDIC wanted litigation wherever they could get it; half the time, even where they couldn’t,” he groans. “The public wanted heads to roll and we made perfect targets.”

Western had a clean public shell; no run-ins with the SEC—they were squeaky clean. But as the recession raged on, it became clear that “clean” didn’t cut it. “People were investigated, detained even, based on what? The suspicion of malfeasance? Yet we saw banks engaging in improper, verging on illegal activity walk away scot-free.”

This federal fishing expedition left Butler with a lingering paranoia; the fear that an army of pencil pushers sporting black suits and earpieces might knock on his door to have their Mission Impossible moment at his expense.

One month into 2009, Western’s shares plunged 95 percent. The finger of blame inevitably found a target. “Our CEO was a great guy, but the recession hit him like headlights on a deer,” Butler laments. “We asked him to resign. It was one of the most painful things I’d ever done.” The resulting shuffle in leadership landed David in the role of acting chairman.

“My job primarily became keeping morale up as we scrambled to find a partner,” he recounts. “We didn’t want depositors losing money, but we didn’t want to lose depositors. If they’ve got half a million in the bank, telling them to move it is hard, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Depositors weren’t the only people Western risked losing. The FDIC shot down attempts to offer retention bonuses, leaving Butler at the mercy of employees’ goodwill. “How do you ask someone not to jump ship when they’re waist-deep in water?”

As Butler fought to keep all hands on deck, Western’s board was rocking from the turbulence of days spent sparring over the bank’s balance sheet and late-night conference calls consumed by quarrels over how and where they would stretch its tier one capital.

“You can’t measure the character of your board until it’s been strained.”

“We had our share of those who didn’t stay the course,” he concedes. “Some resigned; some pointed blame—but then there were the ones who stuck it out. Even when it looked hopeless; even when tensions ran high, their commitment never wavered. I hold those people in the highest regard to this day.”

It was an act of bittersweet mercy when, in May 2009, the other shoe finally dropped.

A cease-and-desist order earlier in the year saddled Western’s board with a bureaucratic obstacle course of audits, reorgs, policy rewrites and loan appraisals; with no less than 15 deadlined reports to the state banking commission. One of the many hoops the board was forced to throw itself through required a reevaluation of Western’s loan loss reserves; an amount they determined to be $33 million. Butler was called to meet with the FDIC shortly thereafter.

“They sat me down and told me we needed $47 million,” he says. “I told them they were about to close my bank. We all sat there silently for a minute.”

Three months later, the state banking commission seized control of Western Community Bank, just $2 million shy of meeting its reserve requirement. The bank was turned over to the FDIC and sold to a local competitor for pennies on the dollar.

Where was Butler—the man who risked it all—that Friday afternoon when they came to take it all away?

“Our legal counsel advised us to stay away from the transition to avoid any situation where we might be questioned without an attorney present,” he explains. “So my wife packed a picnic basket and we drove to the beach.”

What about the anger, the resentment, the righteous indignation at the hopelessness of it all? “There was plenty of that to go around,” he admits. “The fact that we could fail was all they needed to treat us like we would. But you reach a certain age where you don’t have time to be angry. There’s no use holding onto all that bitterness.”

A decade has passed since that Friday afternoon when Butler lost it all. Murmurs of a looming recession seep from the rich vein of alarmist gossip to circulate amongst those with a finger on the pulse. “If those kind of whispers reach your ears, it means you’ve kept one to the ground,” Butler posits. “If you’re a bank director, you’ve got a choice. You can pick that ear up off the ground and look towards the future. Or,” he adds with a grin, “you can bury the rest of your head.”

The Flawed Argument Against Community Banks

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deposit-4-5-19.pngA few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published a story that struck a nerve with community bankers.

The story traced the travails of National Bank of Delaware County, or NBDC, a $375 million asset bank based in Walton, New York, that ran into problems after buying six branches from Bank of America Corp. in 2014.

It’s not that things were going great for NBDC prior to that, because they weren’t. Like many banks in small towns, it had to contend with stiff economic and demographic headwinds.

“As in other small towns that were once vibrant, decades of economic change altered the fabric of Walton,” Rachel Louise Ensign and Coulter Jones wrote in the Journal. “The number of area farms dwindled and manufacturing jobs disappeared.”

“Being located in, and serving, an economically struggling community could bring any bank down,” wrote Ron Shevlin, director of research at Cornerstone Advisors, in a follow-up story a week later.

NBDC hoped the branches acquired from Bank of America, for a combined $1 million, would revive its fortunes. But the deal only made things worse.

The branches saddled NBDC with higher costs and $12 million in added debt. Even worse, half the acquired deposits quickly went elsewhere, provoked by a poorly executed integration as well as, ostensibly, NBDC’s antiquated technology.

“Technology is causing strains throughout the banking industry, especially among smaller rural banks that are struggling to fund the ballooning tab,” Ensign and Jones wrote. “Consumers expect digital services including depositing checks and sending money to friends, which means they don’t necessarily need a local branch nearby. This increasingly means people are choosing a big bank over a small one.”

This echoes a common refrain in banking: that smaller regional and community banks can’t compete against the multibillion-dollar technology budgets of big banks—especially JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America and Wells Fargo & Co.

Community bankers took issue with the article, Shevlin noted, because it seemed to portray the story of NBDC, which was acquired in 2016 by Norwood Financial Corp., as representative of community banks more broadly.

“This is so misleading,” tweeted Andy Schornack, president of Security Bank & Trust in Glencoe, Minnesota. “Pick on one under-performing bank to represent the whole.”

“Community banks are profitable and thriving,” tweeted Tanya Duncan, senior vice president of the Massachusetts Bankers Association. “Most offer technology that makes transactions seamless.”

Schornack and Duncan are right. One doesn’t have to look far to find community banks that are thriving, with many outperforming the industry.

A textbook example is Germantown Trust and Savings Bank, a $376 million asset bank based in Breese, Illinois.

Germantown has generated a higher return on assets than the industry average in 11 of the past 12 years. The only exception was in 2013, when it generated a 1.52 percent pre-tax ROA, compared to 1.55 for the overall industry.

 Germantown-Bank-chart.png

Germantown’s performance through the financial crisis was especially impressive. While most banks reported lower earnings in 2009, with the typical bank recording a loss, Germantown experienced a surge in profitability.

Germantown has gained local market share, too. Over the past eight years, its share of deposits throughout its four-branch footprint in Clinton County, Illinois, has grown from 27.8 percent up to 29.7 percent.

This is just one example among many community banks with a similar experience. For every community bank that’s ailing, in other words, you could point to one that’s thriving.

Yet, there’s another, more fundamental issue with the prevailing narrative in banking today. Namely, the data doesn’t support the claim that the biggest and most technologically-savvy banks are gobbling up share of the national deposit market. Twitter_Logo_Blue.png

In fact, just the opposite has been true over the past five years.

Let’s start with the big three retail banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo—which are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on technology.

These three banks saw their combined share of domestic deposits swell in the wake of the financial crisis, climbing from 21.7 percent in 2007 up to 33.2 percent six years later. Since 2013, however, this trend has gone in the opposite direction, falling in four of the past five years. As of 2018, the three biggest banks in the country controlled 31.8 percent of total domestic deposits, a decline of 1.4 percentage points from their peak.

 Deposit-share-chart.png

The same is true if you broaden this out to include the nine biggest commercial banks. Their combined share of domestic deposits has dropped from a high of 47.6 percent in 2013 down to 45.6 percent last year.

Given the number of branches many of these banks have shed over the past decade, it’s surprising they haven’t lost a larger share of domestic deposits. Nevertheless, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that, despite the gloomy sentiment toward community banks that’s often parroted in the press, their current and future fortunes are far from bleak.

Exclusive: How U.S. Bancorp Views Expansion

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bancorp-3-14-19.pngGreat leaders are eager to learn from others, even their competitors. That’s why Bank Director is making available—exclusively to our members—the unabridged transcripts of the in-depth conversations our writers have with the executives of top-performing banks.

Few banks fit this description as well as U.S. Bancorp, the fifth-largest retail bank in the United States. It has generated one of the most consistently superior performances in the banking industry over the past decade. It’s the most profitable and efficient bank among superregional and national banks. It’s the highest-rated bank by Moody’s. It’s also been named one of the world’s most ethical companies for five years in a row by the Ethisphere Institute. And it has emerged as a leader of the digital banking revolution.

Bank Director’s executive editor, John J. Maxfield, interviewed U.S. Bancorp Chairman and CEO Andy Cecere for the first quarter 2019 issue of Bank Director magazine. (You can read that story, “Growth Through Digital Banking, Not M&A,” by clicking here.)

In the interview, Cecere sheds light on U.S. Bancorp’s:

  • Strategy for expanding into new markets
  • Progress on the digital banking front
  • Perspective on the changes underway in banking
  • Experience through the financial crisis

The interview has been edited for brevity, clarity and flow.

download.png Download transcript for the full exclusive interview

Rodge Cohen: Are We Preparing to Fight the Last War?

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risk-3-1-19.pngHis name might not command the same recognition on the world stage as the mononymous Irish singer and song-writer known simply as Bono, but in banking and financial services just about everyone knows who “Rodge” is.

H. Rodgin Cohen–referred to simply as Rodge—is the unrivaled dean of U.S. bank attorneys. At 75, Cohen, who is the senior chairman at the New York City law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, is still actively involved in the industry, having recently advised SunTrust Banks on its pending merger with BB&T Corp.

Cohen has long been considered a valued advisor within the industry.

In the financial crisis a decade ago, he represented corporate clients like Lehman Brothers and worked closely with the federal government’s principal players, including Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. His character even made an appearance in the movie “Too Big To Fail,” based on a popular book about the crisis by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Eleven years later, Cohen says the risk to the banking industry is no longer excessive leverage or insufficient liquidity—major contributing factors to the last crisis.

The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, passed nearly a decade ago, raised bank capitalization levels substantially compared to pre-crisis levels. In fact, bank capitalization levels have been rising for 40 years, going back to the thrift crisis in the late 1980s. Dodd-Frank also requires large banks to hold a higher percentage of their assets in cash to insure they have enough liquidity to weather another financial storm.

The lesson from the last crisis, says Cohen, revolves around the importance of having a fortress balance sheet. “I think that was the lesson which has been thoroughly learned not merely by the regulators, but by the banks themselves, so that banks today have exponentially more capital, and the differential is even greater in terms of having more liquidity,” says Cohen.

But does anyone know if these changes will be enough to help banks survive the next crisis?

“I don’t think it is possible to calculate this precisely, but if you look at the banks that did get into trouble, none of them had anywhere near the level of capital and liquidity that is required now,” says Cohen. “Although you can’t say with certainty that this is enough, because it’s almost unprovable, there’s enough evidence that suggests that we are at levels where no more is required.”

It is often said that generals have a tendency to fight the last war even though advances in weaponry—driven by technology—can render that war’s tactics and strategies obsolete. Think of the English cavalry on horseback in World War I charging into German machine guns.

It can be argued that regulators, policymakers and even customers in the United States still bear the emotional scars of the last financial crisis, so we all find comfort in the fact that banks are less leveraged today than they have been in recent history, particularly in the lead up to the last crisis.

But what if a strong balance sheet isn’t enough to fight the next war?

“I think the biggest risk in the [financial] system today is a successful cyberattack,” says Cohen. While a lot of attention is paid to the dangers of a broad attack on critical infrastructure that poses a systemic risk, Cohen worries about something different.

“That is a very serious risk, but I think the more likely [danger] is that a single bank—or a group of banks—are hit with a massive denial of service for a period of time, or a massive scrambling of records,” he says. This contagion could destabilize the financial system if depositors begin to worry about the safety of their money.

Cohen believes that financial contagion, where risk spreads from one bank to another like an infectious disease, played a bigger role in the financial crisis than most people appreciate. And he worries that the same scenario could play out in a crippling cyberattack on a major bank.

“Until we really understand what role contagion played in 2008, I don’t think we’re going to appreciate fully the risk of contagion with cyber,” he says. “But to me, that is clearly the principal risk.”

And herein lays the irony of the industry’s higher capital and liquidity requirements. They were designed to protect against the risk of credit bubbles, such as the one that precipitated the last crisis, but they will do little to protect against the bigger risk faced by banks today: a crippling cyberattack.

“That’s why I regard [cyber] as the greatest threat,” says Cohen, “because a fortress balance sheet won’t necessarily help.”

Exclusive: An Interview with Brian Moynihan

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bank-of-america-2-14-19.pngBank Director’s writers and editors talk with the best bankers in the United States to inform the stories we publish on BankDirector.com and in Bank Director magazine. But these conversations often go deeper and extend beyond the subject matter of those stories, leaving a lot of immensely valuable information on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

With this in mind, we are making available—exclusively to our members—the unabridged transcripts of these conversations. It is our belief that the insights found within them can help bankers gain knowledge and improve their own institutions.

For the cover story in the fourth quarter 2018 issue of Bank Director magazine, Executive Editor John Maxfield interviewed Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America Corp., at the bank’s New York City offices.

While the story focused on how Moynihan, who has led Bank of America since 2010, transformed the bank’s culture and performance, the conversation also delved into his views on growth, risk management and other topics of interest to bank leaders.

In this lengthy interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, Moynihan shares:

  • The sources of his philosophy on banking
  • The principles that inform Bank of America’s revamped growth philosophy
  • How history informs his view of the future
  • Lessons learned from the financial crisis
  • How Bank of America deepens relationships with existing customers
  • Why operating leverage helps the bank better manage risk

Larry De Rita, Bank of America’s senior vice president of corporate communications, is also quoted in the transcript.

download.png Download transcript for the full exclusive interview

Prepare Your Portfolio for an Economic Downturn

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portfolio-11-12-18.pngAs we reach the 10-year anniversary of the inflection point of the 2008 financial crisis, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how the economy has (and hasn’t) recovered following the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. If you’ve paid the slightest attention to recent news, you’ve probably heard or read about the speculation of when the nation’s next economic storm will hit. While some reports believe the next downturn is just around the corner, others deny such predictions.

Experts can posit theories about the next downturn, but no matter how strong the current economy is or how low unemployment may be, we can count on at some point the economy will again turn downward. For this reason, it’s important that we protect ourselves from risks, like those that followed the subprime mortgage crisis, financial crisis, and Great Recession of the late 2000’s.

In an interview with USA Today, Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, explained, “It’s just the time when it feels like all is going fabulously that we make mistakes, we overreact, we over-borrow.”

Zandi also noted it usually requires more than letting our collective guard down to tip the economy into recession; something else has to act as a catalyst, like oil prices in 1990-91, the dotcom bubble in 2001 or the subprime mortgage crisis in 2006-07.

As the number of predictions indicating the next economic downturn could be closer than we think continues to rise, it’s more important to prepare yourself and your portfolio for a potential economic shift.

Three Tips for Safeguarding Your Construction Portfolio In the Event of an Economic Downturn

1. Proactively Stress Test Your Loan Portfolio
Advancements in technology have radically improved methods of stress testing, allowing lenders to reveal potential vulnerabilities within their loan portfolio to prevent potential issues. Technology is the key to unlocking this data for proactive stress testing and risk mitigation, including geotracking, project monitoring and customizable alerts.

Innovative construction loan technology allows lenders to monitor the risk potential of all asset-types, including loans secured by both consumer and commercial real estate. These insights help lenders pinpoint and mitigate potential risks before they harm the financial institution.

2. Increase Assets and Reduce Potential Risk While the Market’s Hot
If a potential market downturn is in fact on the horizon, now is the best time for lenders to shore up their loan portfolios and long-term, end loan commitments before things slow. This will help ensure the financial institution moves into the next downturn with a portfolio of healthy assets.

By utilizing modern technologies to bring manual processes online, lenders have the ability to grow their construction loan portfolio without absorbing the additional risk or adding additional administrative headcount. Construction loan administration software has the ability to increase a lender’s administrative capacity by as much as 300 percent and reduce the amount of time their administrative teams spend preparing reports by upwards of 80 percent. These efficiency and risk mitigation gains enable lenders to strike while the iron’s hot and effectively grow their portfolio to help offset the effects of a potential market downturn.

3. Be Prudent and Mindful When Structuring and Pricing End Loans
As interest rates continue to trend upward, it’s crucial that lenders price and structure their long-term debts with increased interest rates in mind. One of the perks of construction lending, especially in commercial real estate, is the opportunity to also secure long-term debt when the construction loan is converted into an end loan.

Due to fluctuations in interest rates, it’s important for financial institutions to carefully consider how long to commit to fixed rates. For lenders to prevent filling their portfolio with commercial loan assets that yield below average interest rates in the future, they may find it more prudent to schedule adjustable-rate real estate loans on more frequent rate adjustment schedules or opening rate negotiations with higher fixed rate offerings (while still remaining competitive and fairly priced, of course).

Though we can actively track past and potential future trends, it’s impossible to know for sure whether we are truly standing on the precipice of the next economic downturn.

“That’s one of the things that makes crises crises—they always surprise you somehow,” said Tony James, Vice Chairman or Blackstone Group, in an interview with CNBC.

No matter the current state of the economy, choosing to be prepared by proactively mitigating risk is always the best course of action for financial institutions to take. Modern lending technology enables lenders to make smart lending decisions and institute effective policies and procedures to safeguard the institution from the next economic downturn—no matter when it hits.

How One Top-Performing Bank Explains Its Remarkable Success

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strategy-10-5-18.pngThe closer you look at U.S. Bancorp’s performance over the past decade, the more you’re left wondering how the nation’s fifth biggest commercial bank by assets has achieved its remarkable success.

Here are some highlights:

  • It was the most profitable bank on the KBW Bank Index for seven consecutive years after the financial crisis.
  • It emerged from the crisis with the highest debt rating among major banks.
  • Its employee engagement scores are consistently at the top of the industry.
  • It has been named one of the most ethical companies in the world for four consecutive years by the Ethisphere Institute.

How has the $461 billion bank based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, accomplished all this?

If you ask Kate Quinn, the bank’s vice chairman and chief administrative officer, the answer lies in its culture.

“There’s a reason that sayings like ‘culture eats strategy for lunch’ are stitched into pillows,” says Quinn.

Quinn doesn’t talk about U.S. Bancorp’s culture from a distance; since joining the bank in 2013 to oversee its rebranding campaign, she has led the charge on articulating and capturing the bank’s culture in a series of value and purpose statements.

“When I was starting to do the work of building the brand, I looked into the history of the company, its genealogy, to figure out our core attributes—the attributes our customers and employees associate with us,” says Quinn. “What I found was this unique thing about us. Any company can say ‘we bring our minds to our customers,’ but there aren’t many companies that can credibly say ‘we bring our hearts to our customers,’ and we can say that. It is real.”

Given that executives at all companies will tell you the same thing, the challenge is to differentiate between companies that pay lip service to these ideals and those that genuinely embrace them.

“The real insight you get about a banker is how they bank,” Warren Buffett has said in the past. “Their speeches don’t make any difference. It’s what they do and what they don’t do [that defines their greatness].”

One way to gauge what a bank does and doesn’t do is to look at its financial performance over an extended period of time. It’s an imperfect proxy, admittedly, but a revealing one nonetheless, as businesses built on unethical or immoral foundations simply aren’t sustainable. At one point or another, the chickens always come home to roost—just ask Wells Fargo & Co.

This is why U.S. Bancorp’s performance, since its current leadership took control of Cincinnati-based Star Banc in 1993, is so significant. It didn’t commit mishaps that caused it to fall prey to a larger competitor in the consolidation cycle of the 1990s. A decade later, it sidestepped the accounting scandals surrounding Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and others that tarnished the images of so many bigger banks. And it steered clear of the worst excesses in the mortgage and securities markets in the lead-up to the financial crisis.

Anyone who knows U.S. Bancorp’s former chairman and CEO Richard Davis will tell you that he embodied principled leadership, adopting an approach that wasn’t only ethical and rational, but also one that embraced balance. He never sent emails to his employees at night, for instance, because he didn’t want to interfere with their home lives. He was also known to call his employees’ parents on their birthdays.

When it came to bottling U.S. Bancorp’s culture, then, one of Quinn’s objectives was to capture Davis’ approach.

“As I was getting my head around what do we do and what are we trying to do, I realized that it isn’t about the products and services,” says Quinn. “When you think about what a bank does—and this came from Richard—it’s really about powering human potential. I told him that I wanted to build his DNA into the company—the culture, the purpose, the core values. That is the part of Richard that has become the fabric of this company.”

But Davis’ influence is just one element of U.S. Bancorp’s broader culture. Other elements come from Davis’ predecessor and successor.

His predecessor, Jerry Grundhofer, was a tactical operator with few equals. He was the dean of efficiency, one of the valedictorians of banking throughout the 1990s.

“Jerry brought a set of values and capabilities to the company that was needed—scrappiness, cut to the chase, financial discipline,” says Quinn. “When Richard came in, he didn’t change that piece of it, he built on top of what Jerry did by adding the human dimension. Jerry had always put the shareholders first. Richard came in and put the employees at the top.”

The same is true of Davis’ successor, the bank’s current chairman and CEO, Andy Cecere, who adds another element into the mix. Cecere’s reputation is that of a practical innovator who’s pushing the bank to focus on change, innovation and technology. His favorite presentation slides, for example, compare the Old Western TV series Bonanza to the Jetsons.

Again, things like this are easy to dismiss as vacuous corporate-speak. But one lesson you learn after spending enough time with top-performing bank CEOs is that just because something sounds trite doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Quinn understands that. It’s why she’s writing these cultural attributes into U.S. Bancorp’s DNA with revamped value and purpose statements. Facile notions of efficiency and operating leverage may excite analysts on quarterly conference calls, but the true source of U.S. Bancorp’s competitive advantage lies in its commitment to doing what’s right.