The Secret to a Low Efficiency Ratio

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efficiency-5-31-19.pngOne of the most important metrics in banking is the efficiency ratio, which is generally viewed as a measurement of how carefully a bank spends money. Following this definition to its logical conclusion, the more parsimonious the bank, the lower its efficiency ratio should be.

But this common understanding fails to capture the true nature of what the efficiency ratio actually measures. It is in reality a fraction that expresses the interrelationship between the two most dynamic forces within any business organization: the growth of revenue and expenses.

Looked at this way, the efficiency ratio is actually a measurement of effective spending—how much revenue does every dollar of spending produce. And embedded within the efficiency ratio is a simple but extraordinarily important concept that is the key to high profitability—positive operating leverage.

But first, let’s look at how the efficiency ratio works. It’s an easy calculation. The numerator, which is the top half of the fraction, is expenses. And the denominator, which sits below it, is revenue. A bank that reports $50 of expenses and $100 of revenue in a quarter has an efficiency ratio of 50 percent, which is the benchmark for most banks (although most fall short).

However, not all 50 percent efficiency ratios are created equal.

Consider two examples. Bank Cheapskate reports $40 of expenses and $100 of revenue in its most recent quarter, for an efficiency ratio of 40 percent. Coming in 10 percentage points under the benchmark rate of 50 percent, Bank Cheapskate performs admirably.

Bank Topline reports $50 in expenses and $125 in revenue in its most recent quarter. This performance also results in an efficiency ratio of 40 percent, equivalent to Bank Cheapskate’s ratio. Again, an impressive performance.

While the two ratios are the same, it is unlikely that most institutional investors will value them equally. The important distinction is how they got there.

The argument in favor of Bank Cheapskate’s approach is simple and compelling. Being a low-cost producer is a tremendous competitive advantage in an industry like banking, which has seen a long-term decline in its net interest margin. It allows to a bank to keep deposits costs low in a tight funding market, or back away from an underpriced and poorly structured credit in a competitive loan market. It gives the bank’s management team optionality.

The case for Bank Topline’s approach is probably more appealing. Investors appreciate the efficiency of a low-cost producer, but I think they would place greater value on the business development skills of a growth bank. In my experience, most investors prefer a growth story over an expense story. Bank Topline spends more money than Bank Cheapskate, but it delivers more of what investors value most—revenue growth.

To be clear, the choice between revenue and expenses isn’t binary—this is where positive operating leverage comes in.

Positive operating leverage occurs when revenue growth exceeds expense growth. Costs increase, but revenue increases at a faster rate. This is the secret to profitability in banking, and the best management teams practice it.

A real-life example is Phoenix-based Western Alliance Bancorp. The bank’s operating efficiency ratio in 2018 was an exemplary 41.9 percent. The management team there places great importance on efficiency, although the bank’s expenses did rise last year. But this increase was more than offset by strong revenue growth, which exceeded expense growth by approximately 250 percent. This is a good example of positive operating leverage and it’s the real story behind the bank’s low efficiency ratio.

The greater the operating leverage, the lower the efficiency ratio because the ratio is relational. It is not solely a cost-driven metric. At Western Alliance and other banks that focus on creating positive operating leverage, it’s not just how much you spend—it’s how many dollars of revenue each dollar of expense creates.

To understand the real significance of a bank’s efficiency ratio, you have to look at the story behind the numbers.

The Big Banks Are Back

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banks-1-28-19.pngIs it now a big bank world that the rest of the industry is just living in?

One could justifiably come to that conclusion based on comments by Tom Michaud, president and chief executive officer at the investment bank Keefe Bruyette & Woods during a presentation on the opening day of Bank Director’s Acquire or Be Acquired conference Sunday in Phoenix.

Approximately 1,300 people are attending the 25th anniversary of Bank Director’s Acquire or Be Acquired event at the JW Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge resort, which will run through Tuesday.

It’s no secret the four largest U.S. banks—JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup—hold dominant positions in the country’s banking market. These four megabanks control approximately 45 percent of the U.S. deposits. But historically, large institutions have been less profitable than much smaller ones in part because their size and complexity have made them more difficult to manage.

That is now changing, according to Michaud.

Bank of America, for example, posted a return on tangible common equity (ROTCE) in 2017 of 10.8 percent. The bank’s ROTCE rose to 15.4 percent in 2018 and is projected to hit 15.9 and 16.5 percent in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

Similar ROTCE increases are forecasted for JPMorgan, Wells and Citi through 2020.

The reason these banks are now operating at a much higher level of profitability is in part because their management teams have figured out how to turn their enormous size into an advantage. Although analysts, consultants and the banks themselves have often touted the advantage of size, it has had an averaging effect on their financial performance as they have grown increasingly larger in recent years.

“It seems now that the scale argument has a lot more traction,” said Michaud.

Just three years ago, the most profitable U.S. banks based on their performance metrics were in the $5 billion to $10 billion asset category—just large enough to gain some benefits from scale but still small enough to escape the averaging effect. This so-called “sweet spot” shifted in 2017 to banks with assets greater than $40 billion, and Michaud expects these large institutions to again claim the sweet spot in 2018 by an even wider margin once the industry’s profitability data are finalized.

One important place large banks have been able to use scale to their advantage is in technology. The U.S. economy is in the midst of a digital revolution, and the banking industry is being forced to embrace digital distribution of consumer products like checking accounts and mortgages. “Consumers really like the digital delivery of retail banking services,” Michaud said.

And it’s the national and super-regional banks that are capturing the greatest share of “switchers”—consumers who are leaving their current bank for another institution that offers a better digital experience. Michaud cited data from the consulting firm AT Kearney showing that national banks are capturing about 41 percent of the digital switchers, with super-regionals taking 28 percent. Even direct banks at 11 percent have been gaining a larger share of switchers than regional banks, local banks and credit unions.

The advantage of scale becomes most apparent when you look at the amount of money large banks are able to invest to upgrade their digital capabilities. Each of the big four banks are expected to invest a minimum of $3 billion a year over the next few years in technology—and some of them will invest significantly more. For instance, JPMorgan’s annual technology spend is expected to average around $10.8 billion.

While not all of that will be invested in digital distribution, the country’s largest bank is investing heavily to build a digital banking capability capable of penetrating any consumer market anywhere in the country.

Your M&A Success Could Depend On This One Thing

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merger-12-19-18.pngBenchmarking key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you more fully understand your bank’s financial condition and operating results, as well as the true value in a potential M&A market.

The success of your M&A strategy – whether buy, sell or stay – measurably increases with a sound grasp of the metrics that drive shareholder value.

KPIs as M&A drivers
KPIs can help you to identify important strengths in your target organization and your own institution. This can help determine the areas you could strengthen in an acquisition, or understand where your bank’s value lies within a merger. You can also learn about your organization’s, or your target institution’s, primary challenges and how this might impact the transaction.

These metrics can also help the organization evaluate the success of the transaction after completion. Have the key performance indicators drastically changed? Was that change different from the anticipated adjustment from the combination of the two entities? Understanding the metrics, and some of the forces impacting them, can be a strong foundation for successful M&A transactions.

Q3 2018 KPI observations
Community banks throughout the U.S. used the strong economy and relatively stable interest rate environment to maintain steady operations throughout the third quarter of 2018.

Baker Tilly’s banking industry key performance indicator (KPI) report reflected almost no change in comparison to the same benchmarks for the second quarter of 2018. Earnings, credit quality and capital adequacy benchmarks all remained essentially the same. This consistency appears to reflect a more stable economic environment, disciplined management of credit pricing and quality, notwithstanding a continued highly competitive environment, and the early stages of a move to higher interest rates.

M-A-chart.png

If there is anything to take away from the relatively unchanged KPIs over the first nine months of 2018, it is that community bankers have diligently pursued the opportunities emerging from the strong economy.

Loan growth, reflected in the comparison of the loan-to-deposits ratios each quarter, has been somewhat subdued. Potential drivers of this include increasing liquidity pressures arising from changes in interest rates, early stages of the potential for a downward credit cycle and the uncertainty of the November midterm elections. These factors kept many community bankers focused on internal matters such as compliance and technology during the second and third quarters of 2018.

Many banks continued to assess consolidation opportunities on both the buy and sell side. Until the recent series of market declines, bank equity currency remained quite strong, supporting a continued active consolidation of the industry, at price points that, on average, exceed 1.5 – 1.7 times book value.

We expect more of the same consistency in the KPIs as we have seen throughout 2018. It does not appear there will be any significant shifts in either direction arising from changes in economic policy. However, the pace of deregulation may subside due to the change in leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If equity markets rebound following the midterms and the Federal Reserve pauses its increase of interest rates, we may see a re-acceleration of the consolidation of community banks, especially those with assets of $500 million or less. Other than an increased emphasis on securing and maintaining low cost deposits, we anticipate community banks to maintain a steady course into early 2019.

The 10 Most Successful Financial Advertisers Right Now

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advertising-11-23-18.pngFinancial institutions have long struggled to stand out in the marketplace and build their brand.

This is because they offer very similar products and services to consumers. But a clear strategy and well-defined corporate culture—and a story told with an effective advertising campaign—can help prospective clients understand what makes a bank special.

We’ve put together a list of banks that do that well.

To identify successful advertisers in the banking space, Bank Director focused on two key metrics: number of impressions—how many times a company’s ads were viewed on TV—and the average estimated cost per impression for each brand. This second metric is weighted to account for peak vs. non-peak advertising times. Together, the two metrics reward a balance between brand reach and an effective use of ad dollars.

Each metric was ranked, and the final score represents an average of the two ranks. In cases where the average of the two was a tie, the bank with the most impressions earned the higher score.

Credit unions and lenders that compete directly with banks are included, along with retail and commercial banks.

Bellevue, Washington-based iSpot.tv, an analytics firm that uses smart televisions to track ad activity, provided the data. The measurement was based on national ad activity from Jan. 1 through Sept. 10, 2018.

The ranking doesn’t account for the creativity of each bank’s advertising, but a compelling, creative ad with clear messaging can be effective in achieving the bank’s strategic goals.

Fifth Third Bancorp was savvy with its ad dollars, at $0.12 per 1,000 impressions, and placed second in the ranking. Its ad campaigns during the time period generated 442 million impressions.

The most buzz for the regional bank came from is its “Fee Sharks” ad, part of the “Banking a Fifth Third Better” branding campaign.

“The overall goal of [the Fifth Third Better] campaign is to build the Fifth Third Bank brand,” says Matt Jauchius, the bank’s chief marketing officer. “We believe that a stronger brand leads to growth and profitability for the bank overall.”

The campaign has been effective, resulting in a 21-percent increase in brand consideration over a roughly one-year period. Brand consideration is a metric Fifth Third and other companies use to measure the likelihood customers would consider the brand the next time they’re looking for a particular product or service. In banking, that tends to be whether a customer would consider the institution for their primary banking relationship—usually a checking account.

“Effective advertising needs to be rooted in a truth about the brand itself,” says Robert Lambrechts, the chief creative officer at Pereira & O’Dell. The San Francisco-based advertising agency worked with Fifth Third on the brand campaign.

“Find the thing that is true about your brand,” he advises. “[Be] honest with yourselves about who you are [and] what you want to do.”

The Fifth Third team found ties between its core value to go above and beyond and the bank’s unique name: Fifth Third employees give more than 100 percent—166.7 percent, to be precise—to help their customers.

Ads like the fee shark are quirky, memorable ways to highlight products, services and features—like fee-free ATMs. All the ads in the branding campaign feature a plucky young woman clad in a blue suit, with a Fifth Third pin and distinctive glasses, who serves as a brand ambassador and a proxy for the bank’s employees. She communicates the brand promise: that the bank works hard to meet the customer’s needs.

Fifth Third uses internal and third-party data to better understand what prospective customers want, how to motivate them, and when and where to place the ad effort—whether that’s on TV or radio, in print, on a billboard or on social media.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. topped the ranking, generating more than 5 billion impressions and spending a little more than an estimated $7 per 1,000 impressions—the fifth most cost-effective of the financial institutions examined in the ranking. The bank has run a number of TV spots in 2018. The ad with the most impressions—“Michaela’s Way,” featuring ballerina Michaela DePrince—promotes Chase QuickPay, which includes the real-time payments solution Zelle.

Donna Veira, chief marketing officer for Chase’s consumer banking and wealth management divisions, told AdAge: “We looked at all of the day-to-day, practical ways in which our customers are using QuickPay and brought those to life.”

Other spots show how easily tennis star Serena Williams uses the bank’s cash-free ATMs, or promote the bank’s business solutions and investment advice.

Most Successful Financial Advertisers

      # of Impressions Estimated cost per 1,000 impressions
  1 JPMorgan Chase & Co. 5,371,208,561 $7.36
  2 Fifth Third Bancorp 441,698,444 $0.12
  3 Citigroup 3,862,125,267 $13.44
  4 PNC Financial Services Group 1,400,939,671 $12.64
  5 Capital One Financial Corp. 545,702,921 $12.56
  6 Regions Financial Corp. 210,530,040 $12.29
  7 PenFed Federal Credit Union 144,093,408 $1.77
  8 Purepoint Financial
(division of MUFG Union Bank, N.A.) 		46,254,915 $1.11
  9 SoFi 1,477,462,492 $15.60
  10 Ally Bank 1,495,976,740 $16.20

Data source: iSpot.tv

Successful Change: Managing Human Capital Risk During Implementation

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risk-3-26-18.pngMany financial services companies are in the process of implementing significant change initiatives or poised on the brink of doing so. As discussed in our previous article, many such efforts fail to meet expectations because leadership has underestimated the human capital risks that threaten strategy execution. But effective implementations can mitigate critical people-related risks while building employee understanding, commitment and resiliency.

The Typical Transition From the Past to the Future
Regardless of the type of change—for example, a consolidation, acquisition or new business model—employees must go through a process of transition. A transition that is smooth reduces the depth and duration of lost productivity, as well as unwanted turnover, and expands the organization’s capacity for future changes.

Employees often initially focus on change as an ending to what they know as familiar, which can foster uncertainty and negative attitudes, such as assuming the change won’t work. Leadership must help employees move first to a mindset that is more neutral and accepting, so employees are willing to give the change a try. From there, management can help employees begin to see the change as a new beginning and understand that the new organization can do better or more.

With most change initiatives, almost every employee is affected to some degree. Employees might need to adapt to a new technology system or move to a different facility. They could find themselves in a much larger department or with a different level of authority. Some of the changes in employees’ individual experiences will play a greater role in the potential for project success than others and therefore warrant greater change management attention. For example, leadership could expend more energy dealing with how managers react to having their authority altered than on employees who merely need to learn new procedures for approvals.

Note that it is not only reductions in authority that require leadership attention. Managers in a smaller bank where the president made all of the salary and promotion decisions might find it difficult to adjust after being acquired by a larger institution where they are expected to be more actively involved in such matters.

Transition Monitoring and Management
Financial services companies should create a change effectiveness scorecard to evaluate the impact, readiness, adoption and benefits realization of each change initiative. Metrics might include the percentage of business results achieved, individual or department change readiness (at project launch and quarterly intervals going forward), training completion rate, key employee retention, client satisfaction, quality of production and employee engagement.

Employee engagement can be measured through responses to pulse surveys conducted on a regular basis to track and improve employee understanding of and buy-in on the change project. These short surveys ask respondents to rank from 1 to 5 the accuracy of statements such as:

  • I understand how this transformation can benefit our employees, customers and community.
  • I believe the communications I receive from the transformation team.
  • I feel that I have enough opportunities to learn about the transformation.
  • I know where to go when I have questions about the transformation process.

When it comes to change projects, individual leaders or employees typically fall into one of four categories based on their level of engagement, performance and impact on project success. Each category calls for different management strategies during project implementation:

  • Advocate (high impact, high engagement): Leadership should recognize and reward high-impact employees who are actively and vocally on board and performing well, and consider increasing their project responsibilities.
  • Supporter (low impact, high engagement): These employees demonstrate their high level of commitment to the project by effectively providing assistance or resources, even though they are not critical to satisfying high-impact project objectives. Leadership should consider increasing their project-related roles and responsibilities.
  • Laggard (high impact, low engagement): These individuals have a low level of commitment to the project—even if they are performing well—but are essential to meeting the project objectives. Leadership should address their low engagement in hopes of moving them to advocate status. For example, the management team could consider demonstrating what’s in it for the employee if the project succeeds. If that effort fails, leadership should consider reassigning these employees from high-impact areas where they could negatively influence others and project success.
  • Bystander (low impact, low engagement): These individuals demonstrate a low commitment level, and their impact is not vital to meeting project objectives. Leadership might consider their potential for greater project impact and address reasons for low engagement.

The human capital risks associated with change initiatives could prove the difference between ultimate success or failure. Particularly when change affects customers, the employee experience has a direct effect on customer experience. By properly managing employees throughout the transition, bank leadership can help employees see change not as a negative ending, but as a positive beginning.

Driving Profitability by Keeping Score

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profitability-2-19-18.pngTwo thousand and seventeen proved to be a pretty good year for banks, and 2018 promises to be even better. While the economic environment of lower taxes, rising rates and promises of deregulation have driven up valuations, the secret sauce that produces results still eludes many. The answer lies deep within banks and can be realized by implementing balanced scorecards throughout that hold people accountable for performance and provide targets for success that drive the bottom line.

Developing benchmarks by individual business lines to enforce accountability can help them improve their staffing, processes and strategies, and often exposes low performers and manual processes that negatively impact profitability. Although this seems logical, in practice few banks have had success in figuring out these scorecards.

The following best practice tips will help in creating these metrics, setting appropriate goals and designing an effective overall performance management strategy.

Keep it Simple: Every department should be working with five to seven (not 20) easy-to-track metrics. Too much detail can cause confusion as well as create more work than it’s worth to calculate. For example, tracking the average time customers wait in line in branches is next to impossible and non-productive, but tracking call center hold times is much easier and most likely exists in a canned report today.

Take a Balanced Approach: A mixture of efficiency, quality and risk benchmarks provides a good balance. The following example of a balanced scorecard in mortgage lending illustrates risk metrics including approval rates, average credit score, client service metrics for turnaround times and efficiency metrics for production of loan officers, processors and underwriters.

metric-chart.pngFocus on the Outliers: Tracking performance is only the first step in developing a scorecard system. As the performance culture matures and as data trends become clearer, identifying outliers and improving performance in those areas is the key. Becoming a high performer sometimes means changing an underlying process or technology. But it can also come down to one or two individuals who are driving either high or low performance. Digging in to understand those variants can pay significant dividends. For example, in our sample scorecard, one loan officer was doing 15 loans per month while others were doing three to four.

While compensation structure can account for some of this variance, the opportunity cost to get those lower performers up to at least average can be significant. It turns out that the officer doing 15 loans per month had reached out to marketing for lists of clients new to the bank that had mortgages at other institutions and was cross-selling those in his market while the others had no idea the information was available.

When it comes to revenue generation, most banks have squeezed expenses and capitalized on the low-hanging fruit. The next step is to drive the bottom line through well-thought-out business line scorecards that produce actionable data to improve performance. The goal is to use these key performance indicators to drive better processes, strong customer service, less risk and higher returns to shareholders.

How to Become a Data-Driven Bank

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data-5-8-17.pngBanks collect lots of data on their customers, but they aren’t always adept at using it to grow their business. Community banks, in particular, are just beginning to realize the power of data analytics and business intelligence.

Client data and the tools to analyze it can transform how banks conduct their commercial lending business. Data-driven banks can leverage analytics to make better informed decisions, streamline operations, and improve customer service.

The following are three steps for boards to consider for successful adoption of better data analytics:

  1. Support investment in systems that organize and centralize data and standardize processes.
  2. Reinforce the systems investment with policy, training and change management initiatives.
  3. Champion the new systems and processes and how they contribute to the bank’s success.

Here are some practical recommendations for a community bank executive who wants to turn data analysis into bottom-line results.

Define the data universe. The data that community banks can use includes company financials, qualitative customer data, and borrower behavioral data, including payment and credit utilization history. Establishing a centralized system that captures this unstructured data consistently is the first step in this process.

Consider a partnership. Effective analytics strategies ensure that short- and long-term goals are aligned with the bank’s current business operations. Partnering with a vendor with the required analytics technology and implementation expertise could help the bank capture the right data and integrate it into their processes.

Data quality is key. The top tactical issues with this approach involve collecting, organizing, and protecting the quality of the data. Maintaining the integrity of analytics requires clean data that is accurate, comprehensive and continually updated. Data quality is key to realizing the value of business intelligence tools.

Communicate early and often. Educating the organization on the value of credit measures, whether back office risk managers or front office sales professionals, will equip all stakeholders with a solid understanding of the new analytic tools and how they support the overall goals of the bank.

Establish Success Metrics. Even data-driven banks should be wary of aligning internal data with external benchmarks and best practices, because the latter may not be applicable to a particular type of business, product focus, marketplace or strategy. Instead, banks can use internal data to define their own benchmarks and measure success against goals and past performance. Assessing actual performance by comparing historical trends to new profitability, default and recovery metrics (including internal ratings) serves as an indicator of improvement. In other words, how would the prior portfolio perform given new tools and measures versus its actual performance?

Leveraging advanced data analytics and business intelligence tools is an investment that, if properly implemented, should pay dividends in the form of higher quality loans, better customer service and increased operational efficiency.

To read the complete white paper, “How to Become a Data-Driven Bank,” click here.