Banking During a Time of Uncertainty

Written by

The following feature appeared in the fourth quarter 2022 edition of Bank Director magazine. It and other stories are available to magazine subscribers and members of Bank Director’s Bank Services Membership Program. Learn more about subscribing here.

For John Asbury, CEO at Atlantic Union Bankshares Corp., a $19.7 billion bank headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, concerns about the direction of the U.S. economy have a familiar feel to them. It was just two years ago that Asbury and the rest of the banking industry were staring into the abyss of an economic catastrophe caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The U.S. economy shrank 31.2% in the second quarter of 2020 when the country was put into lockdown mode to fight the pandemic. And while the economy made a dramatic recovery, growing 38% the following quarter, it was a time of great uncertainty for the nation’s banks as they dealt with an unprecedented set of economic and operational challenges.

For bankers like Asbury, it’s déjà vu in 2022.

“Once again we find ourselves in a period of great uncertainty — which is a familiar place to be,” says Asbury. This time the economic challenges come from a sharp rise in inflation, which came in at 8.5% in July — well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of just 2%. The Fed clearly misread this sudden increase in inflation, thinking it was driven primarily by supply chain disruptions coming out of the pandemic, and now is trying to catch up with a fast-moving train.

Year to date through September, the Fed’s rate setting body — the Federal Open Market Committee — raised the federal funds rate five times, including three successive rate increases of 75 basis points each, bringing the upper limit of the target rate to 3.25%. It’s been a long time since the Fed raised interest rates by such a substantial margin in so short a time. The FOMC was scheduled to meet again in November and December, and Federal Reserve officials indicated in September that rates could reach 4.4% by year-end.

During the early days of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve also pumped money into the economy through a policy tool called quantitative easing, where it bought long-term securities from its member banks. Earlier this year, the Fed began to reverse that policy to reduce liquidity in the economy, which should help boost interest rates.

The result has been a dual economic outlook, with the immediate future looking more promising than it has in years — but with the longer-term prospects clouded by the threat of inflation and the Federal Reserve’s determination to bring it to heel. Rising interest rates are generally a boon to most banks, but there is a threshold point at which higher rates can lead to a prolonged economic downturn — which is not good for banks or most other companies.

“It remains to be seen what [the Fed] will do when push comes to shove but at least for now, it looks like they’re more concerned about reining in inflation than any of the effects — like a slowdown — that such actions could cause,” says R. Scott Siefers, managing director and senior research analyst at the investment bank Piper Sandler & Co.

The challenge for banks is plotting a course through such a confusing landscape. Do they push for loan growth at the beginning of an economic slowdown of unknown depth and duration, or adopt a more conservative posture toward credit? Should they compete for deposits as funding costs inevitably go up, or be content to let some of their excess funding run off? And lurking in the background is the risk that the Federal Reserve ends up tipping the economy into a deep recession as it seeks to choke off inflation.

By a traditional definition, the U.S. economy has already entered a shallow recession. The country’s gross domestic product, which is the monetary value of all goods and services produced in a specific time period, was -1.4% in the first quarter and -0.9% in the second quarter. Recessions are generally thought of as two quarters of economic contraction, but a variety of factors and data are part of that consideration. The Business Cycle Dating Committee, which is part of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is the group that declares when the U.S. is in recession and has yet to declare this current cycle one.

By other measures, however, the economy is doing surprisingly well. The country’s unemployment rate in August was just 3.7% — down from a peak of 13.2% in May 2020 — and the economy added over 500,000 new jobs in July and another 315,000 in August. In another piece of good news, August’s inflation rate was 8.3%, down from 8.5% in July and 9.1% in June, offering a glimmer of hope that the Fed’s rate hikes are beginning to work.

And in many respects, the experience of bankers on the ground is also at odds with the economic data. “What I’ve found myself saying as I speak to our clients and to our teams is that I feel better than I do when I simply read the financial press,” says Asbury. “Despite all the uncertainty, we’re actually in a pretty good place at the moment. Asset quality remains very benign. We see no end in sight to that, which is one of the more astonishing aspects of the whole pandemic, continuing even to now. Liquidity is still very good. We would have expected to see more deposit runoff than we have. It’s really all about business and consumer sentiment, which seems to be going up and down … The reality is that we’re in a pretty good spot.”

Ira Robbins, chairman and CEO at Valley National Bancorp, a $54.4 billion regional bank headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey, offers a similar assessment. In addition to New Jersey, the bank also does business in New York, Alabama and Florida. And a bank’s experience during an economic downturn may depend on its geographic location, because not all regions of the country are affected equally. “I’m sitting in Florida today, and it doesn’t feel like a recession here at all,” says Robbins in a recent interview. The economy might fit the traditional definition of a mild recession, but that doesn’t seem to bother him very much.

“I really don’t think it’s all that relevant to be honest with you,” he says. “When I look at the behavior of our consumers and commercial customers, we would say we’re not in a recession based on activity, based on spending habits, based on the desire to still have capital investments. When it comes to commercial endeavors, the economy still feels very, very strong.”

Valley National is a large residential lender, and Robbins says that the rise in interest rates has chilled the mortgage refinancing market and made it more difficult for first-time home buyers looking for an entry-level home. “But general activity in the purchase market is still very strong,” he says. “The Florida market is still on fire for us. Prices really haven’t abated yet. And the demand is still very strong in the market from a residential perspective.” Commercial real estate activity, including multi-family housing, is also booming in Florida thanks to the continued influx of people from out of state, according to Robbins. “We still have many of our borrowers — developers — looking to this footprint to grow,” he says. “And the rise in interest rates really hasn’t impacted their desire to be in this market.”

Valley National is also seeing a lot of multi-family development in the Jersey City, New Jersey market, where the bank is an active lender. “We have an environment where the supply hasn’t kept up with demand for a long time,” Robbins says. “Irrespective of what’s going on in the interest rate environment, there’s still a lot of people demanding newer product that just isn’t available to them today.”

If Asbury and Robbins see the current economic situation from a glass-half-full perspective, Tim Spence, CEO at $207 billion Fifth Third Bancorp in Cincinnati, Ohio, sees it as half empty. Spence has chosen to position the bank more conservatively given the economy’s uncertain outlook going into 2023. “We’ve elected to be more cautious as it relates to the outlook than many others have been,” he says. That caution has manifested itself in tougher expense control, “paring around the margins in terms of the lending activity” and using swaps to protect the bank’s net interest margin should the Fed end up cutting interest rates in the future, Spence explains.

While the U.S. economy may be slowing down, there are other factors that should buoy the industry’s profitability through the remainder of 2022. Most banks benefit from a rising rate environment because they can reprice their commercial loans faster than market competition forces them to reprice their deposits.

Deposit costs have yet to increase upward even as interest rates have shot up dramatically, and there is still a lot of liquidity in the country’s banking system. Siefers points to Fed data that deposits grew 0.6% in the first half of the year and remarks in an email exchange that he’s “been surprised at how resilient the deposit balances were. The conventional wisdom is that commercial balances have been looking for other homes, while consumer [deposits] have [gone] higher. Net/net, very little movement in total balances.”

One of the dichotomies in the economy is the industry’s strong loan growth despite the evidence of a slowdown. Citing Federal Reserve data, Siefers points out that loans excluding Paycheck Protection Program loans grew 5.5% in the first half of the year. While it might seem counter-intuitive that loans would grow while the economy is cooling off, Tom Michaud, CEO of investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, says that many commercial borrowers have been returning to the loan market after staying out during the early days of the pandemic. “The government took much of the role of lending out of the industry’s hands with the Paycheck Protection Program and other support elements,” he says. “And then after Covid started, most middle market corporations didn’t see any reason to increase borrowing a lot until they had a better feeling about the economy.”

The industry’s asset quality has also remained at historically low levels and along with the Fed’s interest rate hikes, has created what Siefers calls a “Goldilocks environment” with rising margins, strong loan growth and benign credit trends.

This will likely lead to higher profitability in the latter half of the year. “You’re going to see a significant expansion in bank net interest margins in the third and fourth quarters — the likes of which we’ve probably not seen in a couple of decades, because you’re going to have the cumulative impact of the May, June and July rate hikes flowing into the third and fourth quarters,” says Ebrahim Poonawala, who heads up North American bank research at Bank of America Securities.

The dichotomy between low deposit costs and higher rates won’t last forever, of course. David Fanger, a senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service, says that deposit rates typically move very little during the first 100 basis points in rate hikes when the Federal Reserve begins to tighten its monetary policy. And even when they do begin to move upward, it’s never on a one-to-one basis. “Even at the end of the [last] rate hike cycle, deposit rates increased only 30% of the increase in [the federal funds rate],” says Fanger. Once deposit rates do begin to rise — certainly in 2023 if not later this year as the Fed continues its tight monetary policy — that will probably cut into the expanding net interest margin that most banks are currently enjoying, although Fanger does not expect the industry’s margin to contract unless loan growth drops significantly.

What probably will change, however, is a decline in the industry’s liquidity level as banks decide not to compete for excess funds that seek out higher rates than they are willing to pay. Through a combination of federal stimulus legislation like the CARES Act, passed in March 2020 during the Trump administration, and the American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March 2021 during the Biden administration, along with $800 billion in PPP loans that banks originated and the Fed’s quantitative easing policy, trillions of dollars were pumped into the economy during the pandemic. Much of this money ended up on banks’ balance sheets at historically low interest rates. (The federal funds rate in May 2020 was 0.05%.) As rates rise, some of the money will start looking for a higher return.

“I don’t think banks are going to manage their companies just for the absolute level of deposits,” says Michaud. “I believe they’re going to manage their deposits as the market becomes more competitive for deposits relative to the size of their loan portfolio or what they believe is the size of their core bank. Some banks even started doing that in the second quarter. They were happy to let deposits run out of the bank, and they were more willing to focus on their core deposits.”

While it’s possible that the inflation rate peaked in June, Michaud doesn’t expect the central bank to begin lowering the fed funds rate anytime soon. “I think, if anything, the Fed is going to wait to see the outcome from their policy actions to ensure that inflation has gone back down to the level that they wish to see,” he says.

Asbury is of the same mind. “There have been lots of studies that suggest that if the Fed backs off too quickly, that will be a bad thing,” he says. “So, I don’t think rates are coming down anytime too soon.”

In fact, in late summer, there was a disconnect between the fed funds futures market and information coming out of the Federal Reserve. Activity in the futures market implied that the Fed would cut rates next year, even though messaging coming out of the central bank strongly suggested otherwise. The Fed’s summary of economic projections, which includes its dot plot chart that reflects each Fed official’s estimate of where the fed funds rate will be at the end of each calendar year three years into the future, suggests that the median rate will be 4.4% at the end of this year and 4.6% at the end of 2023.

And in a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in late August, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned that “[r]educing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth. Moreover, there will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions. While higher interest rates, slower growth and softer labor conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses. These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation.”

Translation: If it takes a recession to bring the inflation rate back down to 2%, so be it.

Inflation has several direct effects on bank profitability. Like most other industry sectors, banks have seen their employment costs rise in a tight job market. “We’ve had to make adjustments, and we continue to look at what needs to be done to remain competitive for front line, client-facing teammates,” says Asbury. “The war for talent is raging.” Valley National also gave raises that went into effect in June, 5% to those making less than $65,000 a year, and 3.5% for those earning between $65,000 and $75,000 a year. “Those are permanent raises,” says Robbins. “It’s going to cost us almost $5 million a year in increased salary expense. So, we have to do a much better job on the revenue side to make sure we’re generating enough to support those expenses.”

The sharp rise in interest rates has also led to an increase in bond yields, which has impacted those banks that over the last two years used their excess deposits to invest in lower yielding securities. This has resulted in unrealized losses in their accumulated other comphrensive income — or AOCI — line. While these losses are not charged against a bank’s net income or its regulatory capital if the securities are being held for investment rather than trading purposes, they still impact its tangible common equity capital ratios “and industry observers watch that,” says Michaud.

But the biggest impact of inflation is how it drives the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Rising interest rates help fatten the industry’s net interest margin, but they also hike the debt service costs for corporate borrowers as their loans reprice higher. And some of those companies may end up defaulting on their loans in a longer, deeper recession.

As bankers look at the uncertainty hanging over the economy going into 2023, it’s important to give increased attention to customer communication and credit risk analysis. “Banks that have underwriting processes that have survived through multiple economic cycles and that are extremely client-centric will do better,” predicts Poonawala at Bank of America Securities.

“This is an appropriate time to step up communication with the client base, and we are doing that,” says Asbury. “You also have to run sensitivity analyses in terms of the impact of higher borrowing costs. We do this in the normal course of underwriting. Even when rates were at absolute historic lows, we still made credit decisions [by] running scenarios of higher rates and their capacity to service debt and repay in a higher rate environment. That’s just good banking.”

For his part, Robbins sees no need to pull Valley National back from its core commercial borrowers, even with the economy cooling off. “Seventy percent of our commercial origination comes from recurring customers,” he says. “Many of them have been through interest rate environments that have historically been much higher. Their ability to operate in this type of environment isn’t something that really concerns us.” Interest rates would have to go much higher before many of the bank’s core borrowers, particularly in an asset class like multi-family housing, where the demand for new product is high, would pull back from the market, Robbins says.

The larger risk occurs when banks stray beyond their comfort zone in search of yield or volume.

“Because we’ve been in a declining net interest margin environment, banks have been stretching to get into new geographies or asset classes they don’t have any real experience with,” Robbins says. And in an economic downturn, “banks that have done that but haven’t done it in the proper way are going to have real challenges,” he adds.

The difference in perspective may be more nuanced than truly material, but Spence at Fifth Third takes a more cautious view of the future beyond 2022. “From our point of view, it is a challenging environment to understand because the Fed has never had to move at the pace it has,” he says. “We’re coming off 15 years of zero or near-zero interest rates, and an environment where central banks were the largest bond buyers in the world. Now all of a sudden, they’re bond sellers.” Factor in the continued supply chain challenges that were initially driven by the pandemic but are now being accentuated by the war in Ukraine, along with a tight labor market, and it’s a very uncertain time.

Spence outlines three steps that Fifth Third has taken to address this uncertainty. First, the bank is spending even more time thinking about concentration risk. “Are we lending to sectors of the economy … that are going to be more resilient in any environment?” he says. On the consumer side, that has meant more emphasis on super prime customers and homeowners, and less on subprime borrowers even though they pay higher rates. And on the commercial side, that translates into greater focus on commercial and industrial loans to provide inventory financing, equipment purchases and working capital, and less emphasis on commercial real estate and leveraged lending.

Second, Fifth Third has used various hedging strategies to protect its balance sheet for a time when the Fed eventually loosens its monetary policy and begins to lower rates. Spence says the bank has added $10 billion in fixed-rate swaps to build a floor under its net interest margin for the next 10 years.

And finally, the bank is prepared for a scenario in which the Fed has to drive interest rates much higher to finally curb inflation. “In that case, nothing is more important than the quality of your deposit book,” says Spence, who believes that Fifth Third has a strong core deposit franchise.

Spence worries much less about the consequences of being too conservative than being too reckless. “In a business like ours that’s susceptible to economic cycles, the single most important thing that you can do is ask yourself what happens if I’m wrong,” he says. “From my point of view, if we are wrong, then we gave up a couple of points of loan growth in a given year that we can just get back later.”

Chief Risk Officers Help Community Banks Navigate Uncertain Environment

Written by

The role of chief risk officer is no longer relegated to the largest banks. Ever since the Great Recession of 2007 to 2008, banks of all sizes have begun incorporating chief risk officers into the C-suite.

Nowadays, the role could be more useful than ever as community banks confront an assortment of risks and opportunities, including cybersecurity, emerging business lines such as banking as a service, as well as rising inflation and a potential recession.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer Karin Taylor and the teams that report to her helped executives at Grand Forks, North Dakota-based Alerus Financial Corp. understand the potential impacts on the business and coordinate the bank’s response. They addressed employee concerns, made decisions about how to sustain the business during the pandemic, performed stress tests and helped human resources with establishing new policies and communication.

“[CROs] bring some discipline in planning and operations because we facilitate discussion about risks, help identify risk and help risk owners determine if they’re going to accept risk or mitigate risk. And then we do a lot of reporting on it,” she says. “If anything changed in the pandemic, perhaps it was a better understanding of how [the risk group] could better support the organization.”

At $3.3 billion Alerus, Taylor reports directly to the CEO and serves as the executive liaison for the board’s risk and governance committees. Her reporting lines include the enterprise risk group as well as the bank’s legal, compliance, fraud teams, credit and internal audit teams (internal audit also reports to the audit committee). Those kinds of reporting lines allows CROs to help manage risk holistically and break down information silos, says Paul Davis, director of market intelligence at Strategic Resource Management. Their specific risk perspective makes them useful liaisons for community bank directors, who are usually local business people and not necessarily risk managers.

“You’re going to have one member of the management team [at board meetings] talk about opportunities,” he says. “It’s the CRO’s job to say, ‘Here are the tradeoffs, here the potential risks, here the pitfalls and the things we need to be mindful of.’”

Southern States Bancshares, a $1.8 billion institution based in Anniston, Alabama, decided to add a CRO in 2019 as the company prepared to go public. Credit presented the largest risk to the bank, so then-Chief Credit Officer Greg Smith was a natural fit.

His job includes reviewing risk that doesn’t neatly fit into other areas of the bank. He also serves as liaison for the risk committee and sits in on other meetings, like ALCO, to summarize the takeaways.

“While I was focused on risk the entire time I’ve been at the bank, this broadened that horizon and it expanded my perception of risk,” he says.

For instance, the bank’s rollout of the new loan loss accounting standard made him consider risk in the bond portfolio. Working with several attorneys on the board made him think about reputation risk when the bank launched new products and services. That expanded perspective allows him to raise considerations or concerns that different committees or areas of the bank may not be focused on. He can also help the bank price its risk appropriately.

Taylor sees her role as helping Alerus and its directors and executives make empowered decisions; her job isn’t just to say “No,” but to help the bank understand and explore opportunities based on its risk appetite. However, she doesn’t think all community banks need a CRO. Banks of similar asset sizes may have very different levels of complexity and strategies; adding another title may be a strain on limited resources or talent. The most important thing, she says, is that executives and the board feels that they have the right information to make decisions. To that end, Taylor shared a list of questions directors should ask when ascertaining if banks have appropriate risk personnel.

Questions for Directors and Executives to Ask:

  • Do you feel you have a holistic view of risk for your organization?
  • Do you think you have the information you need to understand your risk profile and identify potential pitfalls or risk to your strategy, as well as being able to address opportunities?
  • Is there a good understanding of the importance of, and accountability, for risk management throughout the organization?
  • Can these questions be answered by existing staff, or should we consider hiring for a chief risk officer position?

Bank Profitability to Rebound from Pandemic

Written by

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a defining experience for the U.S. banking industry — one that carries with it justifiable pride.

That’s the view of Thomas Michaud, CEO of investment banking firm Keefe Bruyette & Woods, who believes the banking industry deserves high marks for its performance during the pandemic. This is in sharp contrast to the global financial crisis, when banks were largely seen as part of the problem.

“Here, they were absolutely part of the solution,” Michaud says. “The way in which they offered remote access to their customers; the way that the government chose to use banks to deliver the Paycheck Protection Program funds and then administer them via the Small Business Administration is going to go down as one of the critical public-private partnership successes during a crisis.”

Michaud will provide his outlook for the banking industry in 2022 and beyond during the opening presentation at Bank Director’s Acquire or Be Acquired Conference. The conference runs Jan. 30 to Feb. 1, 2022, at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort and Spa in Phoenix.

Unfortunately, the pandemic did have a negative impact on the industry’s profitability. U.S. gross domestic product plummeted 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020 as most of the nation went into lockdown mode, only to rebound 33.8% in the following quarter. Quarterly GDP has been moderately positive since then, and Michaud says the industry has recaptured a lot of its pre-pandemic profitability — but not all of it. “The industry pre-Covid was already running into a headwind,” he says. “There was a period where there was difficulty growing revenues, and it felt like earnings were stalling out.”

And then the pandemic hit. The combination of a highly accommodative monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board, which cut interest rates while also pumping vast amounts of liquidity into the financial system, along with the CARES Act, which provided $2.2 trillion in stimulus payments to businesses and individuals, put the banking industry at a disadvantage. Michaud says the excess liquidity and de facto competition from the PPP helped drive down the industry’s net interest margin and brought revenue growth nearly to a halt.

Now for the good news. Michaud is confident that the industry’s profitability will rebound in 2022, and he points to three “inflection points” that should help drive its recovery. For starters, he expects loan demand to grow as government programs run off and the economy continues to expand. “The economy is going to keep growing and the pace of this recovery is a key part of driving loan demand,” he says.

Michaud also looks for industry NIMs to improve as the Federal Reserve tightens its monetary policy. The central bank has already begun to reverse its vast bond buying program, which was intended to inject liquidity into the economy. And most economists expect the Fed to begin raising interest rates this year, which currently hover around zero percent.

A third factor is Michaud’s anticipation that many banks will begin putting the excess deposits sitting on their balance sheets to more productive use. Prior to the pandemic, that excess funding averaged about 2.5%, Michaud says. Now it’s closer to 10%. “And I remember talking to CEOs at the beginning of Covid and they said, ‘Well, we think this cash is probably going to be temporary. We’re not brave enough to invest it yet,’” he says. At the time, many bank management teams felt the most prudent choice from a risk management perspective was to preserve that excess liquidity in case the economy worsened.

“Lo and behold, the growth in liquidity and deposits has kept coming,” Michaud says. “And so the banks are feeling more comfortable investing those proceeds, and it’s happening at a time when we’re likely to get some interest rate improvement.”

Add all of this up and Michaud expects to see an improvement in bank return on assets this year and into 2023. Banks should also see an increase in their returns on tangible common equity — although perhaps not to pre-pandemic levels. “We started the Covid period with a lot of excess capital and now we’ve only built it more,” he says.

Still, Michaud believes the industry will return to positive operating leverage — when revenues are growing at a faster rate than expenses — in 2022. “We also think it’s likely that bank earnings estimates are too low, and usually rising earnings estimates are good for bank stocks,” he says.

In other words, better days are ahead for the banking industry.

Smart Ways to Find Loan Growth

Written by

In a long career focused on credit risk, I’ve never found myself saying that the industry’s biggest lending challenge is finding loans to make.

But no one can ignore the lackluster and even declining demand for new loans pervading most of the industry, a phenomenon recently confirmed by the QwickAnalytics® National Performance Report, a quarterly report of performance metrics and trends based on the QwickAnalytics Community Bank Index.

For its second quarter 2021 report, QwickAnalytics computed call report data from commercial banks $10 billion in assets and below. The analysis put the banks’ average 12-month loan growth at negative -0.43 basis points nationally, with many states showing declines of more than 100 basis points. If not reversed soon, this situation will bring more troubling implications to already thin net interest margins and stressed growth strategies.

The question is: How will banks put their pandemic-induced liquidity to work in the typical, most optimal way — which, of course, is making loans?

Before we look for solutions, let’s take an inventory of some unique and numerous challenges to what we typically regard as opportunities for loan growth.

  • Due to the massive government largess and 2020’s regulatory relief, the coronavirus pandemic has given the industry a complacent sense of comfort regarding credit quality. Most bankers agree with regulators that there is pervasive uncertainty surrounding the pandemic’s ultimate effects on credit. Covid-19’s impact on the economy is not over yet.
  • We may be experiencing the greatest economic churn since the advent of the internet itself. The pandemic heavily exacerbated issues including the e-commerce effect, the office space paradigm, struggles of nonprofits (already punished by the tax code’s charitable-giving disincentives), plus the setbacks of every company in the in-person services and the hospitality sectors. As Riverside, California-based The Bank of Hemet CEO Kevin Farrenkopf asks his lenders, “Is it Amazonable?” If so, that’s a market hurdle bankers now must consider.
  • The commercial banking industry is approaching the tipping point where most of the U.S. economy’s credit needs are being met by nonbank lenders or other, much-less regulated entites, offering attractive alternative financing.

So how do banks grow their portfolios in this environment without taking on inordinate risk?

  • Let go of any reluctance to embrace government-guaranteed lending programs from agencies including the Small Business Administration or Farmers Home Administration. While lenders must adhere to their respective protocols, these programs ensure loan growth and fee generation. But perhaps most appealing? When properly documented and serviced, the guaranties offer credit mitigants to loan prospects who, because of Covid-19, are at approval levels below banks’ traditional standards.
  • Given ever-present perils of concentrations, choose a lending niche where your bank has both a firm grasp of the market and the talent and reserves required to manage the risks. Some banks develop these capabilities in disparate industries, ranging from hospitality venues to veterinarian practices. One of the growing challenges for community banks is the impulse to be all things to all prospective borrowers. Know your own bank’s strengths — and weaknesses.
  • Actively pursue purchased loan participations through resources such as correspondent bank networks for bankers, state trade groups and trusted peers.
  • Look for prospects that previously have been less traditional, such as creditworthy providers of services or products that cannot be obtained online.
  • Remember that as society and technology change, new products and services will emerge. Banks must embrace new lending opportunities that accompany these developments, even if they may have been perceived as rooted in alternative lifestyles.
  • In robust growth markets, shed the reluctance to provide — selectively and sanely — some construction lending to help right the out-of-balance supply and demand currently affecting 1 to 4 family housing. No one suggests repeating the excesses of a decade ago. However, limited supply and avoidance of any speculative lending in this segment have created a huge value inflation that is excluding bankers from legitimate lending opportunities at a time when these would be welcomed.

Bankers must remember the lesson from the last banking crisis: Chasing growth using loans made during a competitive environment of lower credit standards always leads to eventual problems when economic stress increases. This is the “lesson on vintages” truism. A July 2019 study from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on failed banks during the Great Recession revealed that loans made under these circumstances were critical contributors to insolvency. Whatever strategies the industry uses to reverse declining loan demand must be matched by vigilant risk management techniques, utilizing the best technology to highlight early warnings within the new subsets of the loan portfolio, a more effective syncing of portfolio analytics, stress testing and even loan review.

The Issue Plaguing Banks These Days

Written by

Net interest margin lies at the very core of banking and is under substantial and unusual pressures that threaten to erode profitability and interest income for quarters to come. Community banks that can’t grow loans or defend their margins will face a number of complicated and difficult choices as they decide how to respond.

I chatted recently with Curtis Carpenter, senior managing director at the investment bank Hovde Group, ahead of his main stage session at Bank Director’s in-person Bank Board Training Forum today at the JW Marriott Nashville. He struck a concerned tone for the industry in our call. He says he has numerous questions about the long-term outlook of the industry, but most of them boil down to one fundamental one: How can banks defend their margins in this low rate, low loan growth environment?

Defending the margin will dominate boardroom and C-suite discussions for at least eight quarters, he predicts, and may drive a number of banks to consider deals to offset the decline. That fundamental challenge to bank profitability joins a number of persistent challenges that boards face, including attracting and retaining talent, finding the right fintech partners, defending customers from competitors and increasing shareholder value.

The trend of compressing margins has been a concern for banks even before the Federal Open Market Committee dropped rates to near zero in March 2020 as a response to the coronavirus pandemic, but it has become an increasingly urgent issue, Carpenter says. That’s because for more than a year, bank profitability was buffeted by mitigating factors like the rapid build-up in loan loss provisions and the subsequent drawdowns, noise from the Paycheck Protection Program, high demand for mortgages and refinancing, stimulus funds and enhanced unemployment benefits. Those have slowly ebbed away, leaving banks to face the reality: interest rates are at historic lows, their balance sheets are swollen with deposits and loan demand is tepid at best.

Complicating that further is that the Covid-19 pandemic, aided by the delta variant, stubbornly persists and could make a future economic rebound considerably lumpier. The Sept. 8 Beige Book from the Federal Reserve Board found that economic growth “downshifted slightly to a moderate pace” between early July and August. Growth slowed because of supply chain disruption, labor shortages and consumers pulling back on “dining out, travel, and tourism…  reflecting safety concerns due to the rise of the Delta variant.”

“It’s true that the net interest margin is always a focus, but this is an unusual interest rate environment,” Carpenter says. “For banks that are in rural areas that have lower loan demand, it’s an especially big threat. They have fewer options compared to banks in a more robust growth area.”

The cracks are already starting to form, according to the Quarterly Banking Profile of the second quarter from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The average net interest margin for the nearly 5,000 insured banks shrank to 2.5% — the lowest level on record, according to the regulator, and down 31 basis points from a year ago. At community banks, as defined by the FDIC, net interest margin fell 26 basis points, to 3.25%. Net interest income fell by 1.7%, which totaled $2.2 billion in the second quarter, driven by the largest banks; three-fifths of all banks reported higher net interest income compared to a year ago. Carpenter believes that when it comes to net interest margin compression, the worst is yet to come.

“The full effect of the net interest margin squeeze is going to be seen in coming quarters,” he says, calling the pressure “profound.”

On the asset side, intense competition for scarce loan demand is driving down yields. Total loans grew only 0.3% from the first quarter, due to an increase in credit card balances and auto loans. Community banks saw a 0.5% decrease in loan balances from the first quarter, driven by PPP loan forgiveness and payoffs in commercial and industrial loans.

On the funding side, banks are hitting the floors on their cost of funds, no longer able to keep pace with the decline on earning assets. The continued pace of earning asset yield declines means that net interest margin compression may actually accelerate, Carpenter says.

Directors know that margin compression will define strategic planning and bank profitability over the next eight quarters, he says. They also know that without a rate increase, they have only a few options to combat those pressures outside of finding and growing loans organically.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Carpenter, a long-time investment banker, sees mergers and acquisitions as an answer to the fundamental question of how to handle net interest margin compression. Of course, the choice to engage in M&A or decide to sell an institution is a major decision for boards, but some may find it the only way to meaningfully combat the forces facing their bank.

Banks in growth markets or that have built niche lending or fee business lines enjoy “real premiums” when it comes to potential partners, he adds. And conversations around mergers-of-equals, or MOEs, at larger banks are especially fluid and active — even more so than traditional buyer-seller discussions. So far, there have been 132 deals announced year-to-date through August, compared to 103 for all of 2020, according to a new analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

For the time being, Carpenter recommends directors keep abreast of trends that could impact bank profitability and watch the value of their bank, especially if their prospects are dimmed over the next eight quarters.

“It seems like everybody’s talking to everybody these days,” he says.

Can a Hybrid Work Model’s Cyber Risk Be Tamed?

Written by

Many U.S. banks are beginning to repatriate their employees to the office after some 16 months of working at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some, like JPMorgan Chase & Co., have demanded that their staff return to the office full time even though many of them may prefer the flexibility that working from home affords. A recent McKinsey & Co. survey found that 52% of respondents wanted a flexible work model post-pandemic, but that doesn’t impress JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon. “Oh, yes, people don’t like commuting, but so what?” the CEO of the country’s largest bank said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in May, according to a recent article in the paper. “It’s got to work for the clients. It’s not about whether it works for me, and I have to compete.”

Other banks, like $19.6 billion Atlantic Union Bankshares Corp. in Richmond, Virginia, are adopting a hybrid work model where employees will rotate between their homes and the office. “We have taken a pretty progressive view there is no going back to normal,” says CEO John Asbury. “Whatever this new normal is will absolutely include a hybrid work environment.” Asbury says the bank has surveyed its employees and “they have spoken clearly that they expect and desire some degree of flexibility. They do not want to go back into the office five days a week [and] if we are heavy-handed, we risk losing good people.”

However, a hybrid work model does create unique cybersecurity issues that banks have to address. From a cyber risk perspective, the safest arrangement is to have everyone working in the office on a company-issued desktop or laptop computers in a closed network. In a hybrid work environment, employees are using laptops that they carry back and forth between the office and home. And at home, they may be using Wi-Fi connections that are less secure than what they have at the office.

“If you think of a typical brick and mortar [environment], the network and computer systems are walled off,” says David McKnight, a principal at the consulting firm Crowe LLP. “No one can gain access to it unless they’re physically there.” In a hybrid work environment, McKnight says, “There are additional footholds on to my network that I don’t necessarily have full visibility into, whether that’s my employee’s home office, or the hotel they’re at or their lake house. That introduces different dynamics, connectivity-wise.”

Still, there are ways of making hybrid arrangements more secure. Full disk encryption protects the content of a laptop’s hard drive if it is stolen. Virtual private networks – or VPNs – can provide a secure environment when an employee is working from a remote location. Multi-factor identification, where employees must provide two or more pieces of authentication when signing on to a system, makes it harder for hackers to break-in to the network. And new cloud-based platforms can enhance security if configured properly.

Many smaller banks struggled to adapt when the pandemic essentially shut the U.S. economy down in the spring of last year, and many banks sent their employees to work from home. Some banks didn’t even have enough laptops to equip all of their workers and had to scramble to procure them, or ask employees to use their own if they had them.

Atlantic Union was fortunate from two perspectives. First, it had already completed a transition throughout the company from desktop computers to laptops, so most of its employees already had them when the pandemic struck. And the bank considers the laptop to be a “higher risk perimeter device,” according to Ron Buchanan, the bank’s chief information security officer. “What that means is you’re putting it in a high-risk environment, and you just expect that it’s going to be on a compromised network [and] it’s going to be attacked.”

The bank has a VPN that only company-issued laptops can access, and this gives it the same level of control and visibility regardless of where an employee was working.

Other security measures include full disk encryption, multi-factor authentication and administrator-level access, which prevents employees from installing unauthorized software and also makes it more difficult for hackers to break into a laptop.

Although cyber risk can never be completely eliminated, it is possible to create a secure environment as banks like Atlantic Union did. But they have to make the investment in upgrading their technology and cybersecurity skill sets. “The tools are there, and the abilities are there,” says Buchanan.

Tailor Innovation With Fintech, Bank Collaborations

Written by

The Covid-19 pandemic reshaped the way that community banks think about their digital products and the expectations that consumers have for them. Digital transformation is no longer an option – it is a necessity.

In fact, 52% of consumers have used their financial institution’s digital banking services more since the start of the pandemic, according to BAI Banking Outlook. However, the research also found that only 61% of consumers feel their community bank understands their digital needs, compared to that 89% of direct bank consumers and 77% of large bank consumers.

As customers’ ever-growing expectations are not being met, banking teams are also concerned that their digital tools may be missing the mark. For many, the investments into digital solutions and tools are not having as wide as an impact as expected; on occasion, they do not hold any true benefit to their current and prospective account holders.

In addition, many community banks find themselves innovating for the sake of innovating, rather than solving real problems that exist within their target market. The communities that these banks serve are distinctive and can present unique challenges and opportunities, unlike those as little as a state away. Community banks must consider practical, powerful digital tools that benefit their one-of-a-kind customer base.

Rather than a product-driven approach to development, community banks must look to the niche needs within the market to discover areas to innovate. Identifying obstacles in the financial lives of existing customers and prospects ensures that community banks are working to solve a problem that will alleviate pain points for accountholders. But, with limited time and resources, how can this be accomplished?

Fintech-Bank Partnerships
Community banks can attract new customers, expand existing relationships and improve customer experience within the specific communities that they serve by implementing fintech solutions that are  specialized to the individual market or demographic.

It makes sense. Fintech-bank partnerships can pair a bank’s distinct market opportunities with technology that can effectively unlock niche verticals. We collaborated with five community banks who were searching for a responsive web app for digital commercial escrow and subaccounting that would eliminate the manual processes that limited their ability to handle commercial escrow and subaccounting accounts. Engaging with a fintech and leveraging extensive resources that are dedicated to developing and improving upon innovative technology gave these institutions a solution built with their companies in mind.

These partnerships between fintechs and banks are also more financially feasible — many community banks are unable to develop similar solutions in-house due to understaffing or lack of resources. With the help of a fintech, the institution can implement solutions faster and reach profitable clients sooner.

Fintech and bank collaborations are changing the way that community banks innovate. Together, they can expand the potential of a solution, both in its specialization and its capability, to better meet customer needs. Banking teams can provide the digital tools that their clients need and attract desirable clients that they hope to serve.

The Post-Pandemic Priorities for Audit and Risk Committees

Written by

Even as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to reshape the banking and financial services industries, forward-looking organizations are focusing on how they can adapt to a post-pandemic world. With many business processes and controls forever changed, boards of directors — including their audit and risk committees — acknowledge that their views on fundamental risk issues must change as well.

New Workplaces, New Risks
One of the pandemic’s most disruptive effects was the upheaval of the centralized workforce. For decades, employees gathered together in a central location to work. Businesses took great pride in these workplaces, even putting their names atop the buildings in which they were located.

However, the pandemic shattered that model — possibly permanently — along with the concept of regular office hours and the expectations that personal devices should not be used for company business. During the pandemic, employees worked from their kitchens and dining rooms, improvising as they adapted to new ways of operating that would have been impossible 20 years ago. Beyond the obvious physical, security and technical risks associated with this dispersal, board members should understand some of the less visible risks.

For example, corporate culture often is shaped from the ground up through casual workplace interactions, which can be lacking in a remote work arrangement. Similarly, if people cannot gather together physically to brainstorm ideas, innovation and creativity can suffer. Many executives also lament their inability to read body language, tone of voice and other nuances in employees’ behavior to spot potential problems.

These types of risks are inherently difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, risk committees should be aware of them and ascertain whether management is addressing them.

Of even more pressing concern, however, are the effects that a decentralized workforce has on a bank’s business processes and control environment. While the immediate responsibility for overseeing management’s response to these risks might be assigned to the audit and risk committees, ultimately all board members have oversight responsibility and should make a committed effort to understand these risks.

Audit and risk committee priorities
Previously, when audit committees addressed risks associated with business processes and controls, they had the advantage of operating in something like a laboratory. The bank controlled most of the variables such as access controls, approvals and validations. In the post-pandemic world, however, risk monitoring and mitigation efforts must address new variables outside the bank’s control.

One specific audit committee priority is the need to evaluate how a dispersed workforce affects the control environment. Controlling access to systems is an area of major risk; remote reconciliations, remote approvals and digital signatures also are important concerns.

While a virtual private network generally would be the preferred method of providing remote employee access, that capability often was unavailable during the pandemic. Other options became necessary. In addition, many controls had to be redesigned quickly, with little time for testing the adequacy of their design or the effectiveness of the implementation.

Now is the time for many audit committees to take a step back and look holistically at their banks’ control environments. In addition to system access, this overview should include controls governing the retention of sensitive data, timely execution of controls, coordination to resolve deficiencies and validation of secondary reviews.

In assessing such controls, committee members might be constrained by their limited understanding of the technology. Given the novel nature of today’s situation, audit committees should consider getting qualified technical assistance, independent of management, to evaluate the steps taken to accommodate the new work environment.

Strategic issues and board concerns
Both the risk committee and the full board should consider broader questions as well. At a strategic level, boards should explore whether management’s response to the pandemic is sustainable. In other words, should the new practices the bank established — including remote work arrangements — become permanent?

Bank management teams have issued many press releases recounting how successfully they responded to the crisis. As banks move into the post-pandemic world, board members should review these responses and ask whether the new practices will allow for growth and innovation so that their banks can thrive in the future while still maintaining a well-controlled work environment.

As they revisit documented policies, controls and procedures — and remeasure the associated risks — boards and management teams ultimately must decide whether the new control environment is consistent with the strategy of the bank and capable of sustaining its desired organizational culture.

Banking’s Vaccine Dilemma

Written by

David Findlay has witnessed several crises over his 37-year banking career, but he says the Covid-19 pandemic has been the most challenging — one that continues to redefine what it means to be a good employer.

“We took a very protective stance of our entire workforce,” says Findlay, the CEO of $6 billion Lakeland Financial Corp., based in Warsaw, Indiana. Lakeland’s subsidiary, Lake City Bank, has followed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health department guidance to sanitize branches, and closed lobbies as needed. Around one-third of employees worked remotely.

These early decisions were easy, Findlay adds. Encouraging employees to get vaccinated against Covid-19 has resulted in a new dilemma, due to “divisions between those [who] believe in the efficacy of the vaccine,” he says, “and those [who] don’t.”

Righting the economic ship has long hinged on successfully defeating the coronavirus through the development and broad adoption of one or — as came to pass — multiple vaccines. “Ultimately, the economic recovery depends on success in getting the pandemic under control, and vaccinations are critical to our ability to accomplish that,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Senate Banking Committee in March.

Like all businesses, vaccinations allow banks to safely reopen branches and repatriate staff into offices. All three of the Covid-19 vaccines available in the U.S. are currently authorized for emergency use by the Federal Drug Administration; some Americans say they won’t get vaccinated until they receive full approval by the FDA.

In early May, Lakeland rolled out an organization-wide vaccination program, updating employees about Covid-19 cases, quarantines and vaccination efforts for the organization. Employees have had access to an on-site vaccination clinic, and the bank pays a $100 bonus to each vaccinated employee, with another $100 to the nonprofit of their choice.

The program was retroactive, so the roughly 40% of employees who were already fully vaccinated were rewarded, too. As of June 10, half of the bank’s employees reported that they had been vaccinated, which compares favorably to Indiana’s population, at 39%, and 30% for Lakeland’s home base in Kosciusko County.

“We have made it clear that this is a personal choice and that we must all respect each other, regardless of [our] position on the vaccine,” says Findlay. “It has been a challenging 17 months, and we must all stick together so our culture can survive the pandemic.”

Carrots, not sticks, also drive the vaccination program at Pinnacle Financial Partners. “This is a personal decision, it’s a medical decision, so we don’t want to cross that line,” says Sarae Janes Lewis, director of associate and client experience at the $35 billion bank.

Pinnacle started communicating the benefits of the vaccine in December 2020 — around the time that the FDA first approved emergency use for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. It started its incentive program in March, after the vaccine became more broadly available. Employees get time off to get vaccinated — a half day per shot — and receive a $250 gift card to spend as they like. “We wanted to make the amount enough to incentivize people,” says Lewis, “but we didn’t want it to be so much that it felt like someone who had not made that decision yet would feel overly pressured.” Pinnacle includes a thank-you note with each gift card.

And they’re promoting the upsides of getting vaccinated. Vaccinated employees aren’t required to wear a mask, for example; those who haven’t yet gotten the vaccine are asked to mask up. Pinnacle isn’t policing its employees’ mask use.

When Lewis and I spoke, 64% of Pinnacle’s associates reported to the bank that they were fully vaccinated against Covid-19. That’s well ahead of the bank’s hometown of Nashville, at 44%, and home state of Tennessee, where roughly one-third of eligible individuals are fully vaccinated. An employee survey revealed that many of Pinnacle’s employees who are hesitant may reconsider once one or more of the vaccines receive full FDA approval. When that happens, Lewis says that the bank may ramp up communications again, and incentives will remain in place.

This high vaccination rate — and understanding the vaccination status of its employees — has helped Pinnacle reopen locations and get a little closer to normal operations. “If there does happen to be an exposure, we’re not having to close offices anymore,” Lewis says. “It’s been pretty amazing to have that stability.”

Lake City and Pinnacle both boast above-average vaccination rates compared to their communities, but they’re still below President Joe Biden’s goal for 70% of American adults to be partially or fully vaccinated by the Fourth of July. So, should banks help close this gap by requiring that employees get vaccinated?

Companies can do that, according to guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that was updated in late May.

Adam Maier, a partner at the law firm Stinson LLP, believes banks like Pinnacle and Lake City, that focus on education and modest incentives, have the right approach. The EEOC guidance is “fraught with uncertainties,” he adds. “It’s such a tightrope to be walking to mandate vaccines and also make sure you’re not doing it on a discriminatory basis, or with a discriminatory outcome.” Companies still must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, pregnancy or national origin. Incentives also can’t be coercive.

Both Lake City and Pinnacle emphasize their respect for employee choice, and that appears to be a consistent theme for the industry. Bank of America Corp. CEO Brian Moynihan was asked in the company’s April shareholder call if the board would “commit to not coercing our employees into getting the COVID vaccine.” Moynihan responded that the bank emphasized communication and education — and the right for each employee to come to their own decision.

The megabank asks employees to update their vaccination status through an online portal. Requesting an employee’s vaccine status — confidentially — is clearly permitted by the guidance, Maier confirms.

“Whatever your approach is, just try to be respectful,” advises Maier. “Be reasonable and rational, and don’t get caught up in any individual employee’s decision.”

How Fintechs Can Help Advance Financial Inclusion

Written by

Last year, the coronavirus pandemic swiftly shut down the U.S. economy. Demand for manufactured goods stagnated while restaurant activity fell to zero. The number of unbanked and underbanked persons looked likely to increase, after years of decline. However, federal legislation has created incentives for community banks to help those struggling financially. Fintechs can also play an important role.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected everyone — but not all equally. Although the number of American households with bank accounts grew to a record 95% in 2019 according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s “How America Banks” survey, the crisis is still likely to contribute to an increase in unbanked as unemployment remains high. Why should banks take action now?

Financial inclusion is critical — not just for those individuals involved, but for the wider economy. The Financial Health Network estimates that 167 million America adults are not “financially healthy,” while the FDIC reports that 85 million Americans are either unbanked or “underbanked” and aren’t able to access the traditional services of a financial institution.

It can be expensive to be outside of the financial services space: up to 10% of the income of the unbanked and underbanked is spent on interest and fees. This makes it difficult to set aside money for future spending or an unforeseen contingency. Having an emergency fund is a cornerstone of financial health, and a way for individuals to avoid high fees and interest rates of payday loans.

Promoting financial inclusion allows a bank to cultivate a market that might ultimately need more advanced financial products, enhance its Community Reinvestment Act standing and stimulate the community. Financial inclusion is a worthy goal for all banks, one that the government is also incentivizing.

Recent Government Action Creates Opportunity
Recent federal legislation has created opportunities for banks to help individuals and small businesses in economically challenged areas. The Consolidated Appropriations Act includes $3 billion in funding directed to Community Development Financial Institutions. CDFIs are financial institutions that share a common goal of expanding economic access to financial products and services for resident and businesses.

Approximately $200 million of this funding is available to all financial institutions — institutions do need not to be currently designated as a CDFI to obtain this portion of the funding. These funds offer a way to promoting financial inclusion, with government backing of your institution’s assistance efforts.

Charting a Path Toward Inclusion
The path to building a financially inclusive world involves a concerted effort to address many historic and systemic issues. There’s no simple guidebook, but having the right technology is a good first step.

Banks and fintechs should revisit their product roadmaps and reassess their innovation strategies to ensure they use technologies that can empower all Americans with access to financial services. For example, providing financial advice and education can extend a bank’s role as a trusted advisor, while helping the underbanked improve their banking aptitude and proficiency.

At FIS, we plan to continue supporting standards that advance financial inclusion, provide relevant inclusion research and help educate our partners on inclusion opportunities. FIS actively supports the Bank On effort to ensure Americans have access to safe, affordable bank or credit union accounts. The Bank On program, Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund, certifies public-private partnership accounts that drive financial inclusion. Banks and fintechs should continue joining these efforts and help identify new features and capabilities that can provide affordable access to financial services.

Understanding the Needs of the Underbanked
Recent research we’ve conducted highlights the extent of the financial inclusion challenge. The key findings suggest that the underbanked population require a nuanced approach to address specific concerns:

  • Time: Customers would like to decrease time spent on, or increase efficiency of, engaging with their personal finances.
  • Trust: Consumers trust banks to secure their money, but are less inclined to trust them with their financial health.
  • Literacy: Respondents often use their institution’s digital tools and rarely use third-party finance apps, such as Intuit’s Mint and Acorns.
  • Guidance: The underbanked desire financial guidance to help them reach their goals.

Financial institutions must address both the transactional and emotional needs of the underbanked to accommodate the distinct characteristics of these consumers. Other potential banking product categories that can help to serve the underbanked include: financial services education programs, financial wellness services and apps and digital-only banking offerings.

FIS is committed to promoting financial inclusion. We will continue evaluating the role of technology in promoting financial inclusion and track government initiatives that drive financial inclusion to keep clients informed on any new developments.