A Look Ahead to 2022: The Year of Digital Lending

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2021 has been a year of challenge and change for community bankers, especially when it comes to lending.

Banks modernized and digitized significant portion of loan activity during the pandemic; as a byproduct, customers have begun to realize the inefficiencies in traditional lending processes. Community financial institutions that hope to stay ahead in 2022 should prioritize the incorporation of digital and automated loan processes.

Although the need to digitize commercial lending has long been a point of discussion, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) sparked a fire that turned talk into action for many institutions. Bankers quickly jumped in to help small businesses receive the funding they needed, whether that meant long hours, adopting new technologies or creating new processes. The amount of PPP loans processed in that small window of time would not have been possible without many bankers leveraging trusted technology partners.

One result of this approach was enhancing transparency and boosting efficiencies while helping small businesses at the same time. Many in the banking industry saw firsthand that, despite the commonly held belief, it is possible to digitize lending while maintaining personal, meaningful relationships. Bankers do not have to make a choice between convenience and personal connection, and we expect to see more institutions blend the two going forward.

Bankers also have a newfound familiarity with Small Business Administration programs following the wind down of the PPP. The program marked many institutions’ first time participating in SBA lending. Many now have a greater understanding of government guaranteed lending and are more comfortable with the programs, opening the door for continued involvement.

Embracing digitization in lending enhances efficiencies and creates a more seamless experience not only for the borrower, but for employees institution-wide. This will be especially important as the “Great Retirement” continues and bank executives across the country end their careers with no one in place to succeed them. To make the issue even worse, recruiting and maintaining technology talent has become increasingly difficult — even more so in rural markets. Such issues are leading some banks to sell, disrupting the businesses and communities that rely on them.

Partnering with technology providers can give institutions the bandwidth to effectively serve more small businesses and provide them with the customer experiences they have come to expect without increasing staff. Adopting more digital and automatic aspects in small business lending allows banks to reduce tedious manual processes and optimize efficiencies, freeing up employee time and resources so they can focus on strategy and growth efforts. Not to mention, such a work environment is more likely to attract and retain top talent.

Using technology partners to centralize lending also has benefits from a regulatory compliance standpoint, especially as potential changes loom on the horizon. Incorporating greater digitization across the loan process provides increased transparency into relevant data, which can streamline and strengthen a bank’s documentation and reporting. The most successful institutions deeply integrate lending systems into their cores to enable a holistic, real-time view of borrower relationships and their portfolio.

Community institutions have been a lifeline for their communities and customers over the last two years. If they want to build off that momentum and further grow their customer base, they must continue to lean into technology and innovation for lending practices. Developing a comprehensive small business strategy and digitizing many aspects of commercial, small business and SBA lending will position community banks to optimize their margins, better retain their talent and help their communities thrive.

The Emerging Impacts of Covid Stimulus on Bank Balance Sheets

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In the middle of 2020, while some consumers were stockpiling essentials like water and hand sanitizer, many businesses were shoring up their cash reserves. Companies across the country were scrambling to build their war chests by cutting back on expenses, drawing from lines of credit and tapping into the Small Business Administration’s massive new Paycheck Protection Program credit facility.

The prevailing wisdom at the time was that the Covid-19 pandemic was going to be a long and painful journey, and that businesses would need cash in order to remain solvent and survive. Though this was true for some firms, 2020 was a year of record growth and profitability for many others. Further, as the SBA began forgiving PPP loans in 2021, many companies experienced a financial windfall. The result for community banks, though, has been a surplus of deposits on their balance sheets that bankers are struggling to deploy.

This issue is exacerbated by a decrease in loan demand. Prior to the pandemic, community banks could generally count on loan growth keeping up with deposit growth; for many banks, deposits were historically the primary bottleneck to their loan production. At the start of 2020, deposit growth began to rapidly outpace loans. By the second quarter of 2021, loan levels were nearly stagnant compared to the same quarter last year.

Another way to think about this dynamic is through the lens of loan-to-deposit (LTD) ratios. The sector historically maintained LTDs in the mid-1980s, but has recently seen a highly unusual dip under 75%.

While these LTDs are reassuring for regulators from a safety and soundness perspective, underpinning the increased liquidity at banks, they also present a challenge. If bankers can’t deploy these deposits into interest-generating loans, what other options exist to offset their cost of funds?

The unfortunate reality for banks is that most of these new deposits came in the form of demand accounts, which require such a high degree of liquidity that they can’t be invested for any meaningful level of yield. And, if these asset and liability challenges weren’t enough, this surge in demand deposits effectively replaced a stalled demand for more desirable timed deposits.

Banks have approached these challenges from both sides of the balance sheet. On the asset side, it is not surprising that banks have been stuck parking an increasing portion of the sector’s investment assets in low-yield interest-bearing bank accounts.

On the liabilities side, community banks that are flush with cash have prudently trimmed their more expensive sources of funds, including reducing Federal Home Loan Banks short-term borrowings by 53%. This also may be partially attributable to the unusual housing market of high prices and low volumes that stemmed from the pandemic.

As the pandemic subsides and SBA origination fees become a thing of the past, shareholders will be looking for interest income to rebound, while regulators keep a close eye on risk profiles at an institutional level. Though it’s too soon to know how this will all shake out, it’s encouraging to remember that we’re largely looking at a profile of conservative community banks. For every Treasury department at a mega bank that is aggressively chasing yield, there are hundreds of community bank CEOs that are strategically addressing these challenges with their boards as rational and responsible fiduciaries.

Visit https://www.otcmarkets.com/market-data/qaravan-bank-data to learn more about how Qaravan can help banks understand their balance sheets relative to peers and benchmarks.

The Issue Plaguing Banks These Days

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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.

How Banks Can Beat Big Tech at Its Own Game

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For the last decade, headline after headline has predicted the demise of banks at the hands of the tech giants. Why? One word: data.

Finance is — and always has been — a data-dependent business. Providing a commercial loan relies on knowing how likely the would-be borrower is to default, a rudimentary data-processing task that is exactly the expertise that Big Tech has. These companies, which include Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google, can generate and leverage large-scale, granular and real-time data on their users, and have used this to build the largest and most valuable businesses in the world.

By comparison, many banks still don’t fully appreciate the value of their data, and have yet to generate meaningful financial returns from it. This is because most of their data is siloed and sprawled throughout the organization across customer onboarding, marketing, financial crime and fraud and credit risk. Instead of being regarded as a valuable commodity, data is seen as a potential temptation for hackers and a cost that needs to be managed.

If banks can learn to leverage their data like these technology giants — embracing digital transformation to lend faster, smarter and more to businesses — they can beat Big Tech at its own game. Unlike Big Tech, banks have long-worked in regulated environments that require all participants to follow the same rules. As a result, they figured out how to work collaboratively with regulators at speed and at scale, and established robust processes and governance around areas such as data ethics and privacy. This has helped build consumer trust and burnished relationships.

This proved to be a powerful combination over the last 15 months as Covid-19 forced states and businesses to temporarily shut down. The government turned to banks, not Big Tech, to help support businesses, via initiatives such as the Paycheck Protection Program and the Main Street Lending Program.

West Reading, Pennsylvania-based Customers Bancorp rose to this challenge and leveraged OakNorth’s ON Credit Intelligence Suite to identify which industries in its portfolio were more stressed and which metrics it should use to determine risk profiles. Data helps banks such as Customers identify overlooked market sectors and business types that are good credits, but could be difficult for lenders to take on without the data or analytics to make an informed decision. Embracing technology to leverage data effectively allowed Customers Bancorp to provide over 100,000 loans and become the sixth-most active PPP lender in the US – a substantial feat for a bank with $18.8 billion in assets.

Regulatory know-how, proprietary data sources and specialized services offer ways for banks to compete with — or indeed, collaborate — with Big Tech. This has been demonstrated through partnerships such as Goldman Sachs Group and Apple, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Amazon. Leveraging data and digital transformation will empower banks to discover gaps in the market and even attract borrowers which Big Tech is unable to. After all, not every business will be keen on the idea of borrowing from the same company that helps them share goofy photos with their friends.

Three Things Bankers Learned During the Pandemic

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It’s been well documented how the pandemic lead to the digitization of banking on a grand scale.

But what bankers discovered about themselves and the capabilities of their staff was the real eye-opener. Firms such as RSM, an audit, tax and consulting company that works with banks nationwide, saw how teams came together in a crisis and did their jobs effectively in difficult circumstances. Banks pivoted toward remote working, lobby shut-downs, video conferencing and new security challenges while funneling billions in Paycheck Protection Program loans to customers. The C-suites and boards of financial institutions saw that the pandemic tested their processes but also created an opportunity to learn more about their customers.

Overall, the pandemic changed all of us. From our discussions with the leaders of financial institutions, here are three major things bankers learned about themselves and their customers during the pandemic.

1. Customers Want to Use Technology
Banks learned that customers, no matter their generation, were able to use technology effectively. Banks were able to successfully fulfill the needs of their customers, as more devices and technologies are available to banks at all price points and varying degrees of complexity. Post-pandemic, this practice will continue to help increase not only internal efficiencies but convenience for customers. As banks compete with many of the new digital providers, this helps even the playing field, says Christina Churchill, a principal and national lead for financial institutions at RSM US LLP.

Did you have a telemedicine appointment during the pandemic? Do you want to go back to driving to a doctor and sitting in a waiting room for a short appointment, given a choice? Probably not. Nor will bank customers want to come to a branch for a simple transaction, says Churchill.

The pandemic made that all too clear. Banks had to figure out a way to serve customers remotely and they did. Digital account opening soared. Banks stood up secure video conferencing appointments with their customers. They were successful on many counts.

2. Employees Can Work Remotely
The myth that bankers were all working effectively while in the office was exposed. Instead, some found employees were more effective while not in the office.

Technology helped bridge the gap in the existing skill set: Bankers learned how to use technology to work remotely and used it well, says Brandon Koeser, senior manager at RSM. Senior leaders are finding that getting employees back to the office on a strict 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule may be difficult. “Some bankers have asked me, ‘do we return to the office? Do we not go back?’” says Koeser. “And I think the answer is not full time, because that is the underlying desire of employees.”

After surveying 27,500 Americans for a March 2021 study, university researchers predicted that Covid-19’s mass social experiment in working from home will stick around. They estimate about 20% of full workdays will be supplied from home going forward, leading to a 6% boost in productivity based on optimized working arrangements such as less time commuting.

Still, many senior bank leaders feel the lack of in-person contact. It’s more difficult and time-consuming to coach staff, brainstorm or get to know new employees and customers. It’s likely that a hybrid of remote and in-person meetings will resume.

3. Banks Can Stand Up Digital Quickly
Banks used to spend months or years building systems from scratch. That’s no longer the case, says Churchill. Many banks discovered they can stand up technological improvements within days or weeks. Ancillary tools from third-party providers are available quickly and cost less than they did in the past. “You don’t have to build from scratch,” Koeser says. “The time required is not exponential.”

Recently, RSM helped a bank’s loan review process by building a bot to eliminate an hour of work per loan by simply pulling the documentation to a single location. That was low-value work but needed to be done; the bot increased efficiency and work-life quality for the bank team. A robotic process automation bot can cost less than $10,000 as a one-time expense, Churchill says.

Throughout this year, senior bankers discovered more about their staff and their capabilities than they had imagined. “It really helped people look at the way banks can process things,” Churchill says. “It helped gain efficiencies. The pandemic increased the reach of financial institutions, whom to connect with and how.”

The pandemic, it turned out, had lessons for all of us.

A Lending Platform Prepared for Pandemic Pitfalls

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Managing a loan portfolio requires meticulous review, careful documentation and multiple levels of signoff.

That can often mean tedious duplication and other labor-intensive tasks that tie up credit administration staffers. So, when Michael Bucher, chief credit officer at Lawton, Oklahoma-based Liberty National Bank, came across a demonstration of Teslar Software’s portfolio management system, he couldn’t believe it. The system effortlessly combined the most labor-intensive and duplicative processes of loan management, stored documents, tracked exceptions and generated reports that allowed loan and credit officers to chart trends across borrowers. The $738 million bank signed a contract at the end of 2019 and began implementation in February 2020.

That was fortuitous timing.

Teslar Software’s partnership with institutions like Liberty National, along with its efforts to assist banks and borrowers with applications for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, earned it the top spot in the lending category in Bank Director’s 2021 Best of FinXTech Awards. Finalists included Numerated — a business loan platform that was another outperformer during the PPP rollout — and SavvyMoney, which helps banks and credit unions offer pre-qualified loans through their digital channels. You can read more about Bank Director’s awards methodology and judging panel here.

Prior to implementing Teslar Software, Liberty National used a standalone platform to track every time a loan didn’t meet the bank’s requirements. It was an adequate way to keep track of loan exceptions when the bank was smaller, but it left him wondering if it would serve the bank’s needs as it continued to grow. The old platform didn’t communicate with the bank’s Fiserv Premier core, which meant that when the bank booked a new loan, a staffer would need to manually input that information into the system. The bank employed one person full-time to keep the loan tracking system up-to-date, reconcile it with the core and upload any newly cleared exceptions on various loans.

Bucher says it was immediately apparent that Teslar Software offered efficiency gains. Its system can integrate with several major cores and is refreshed daily. It collects documentation that different areas within the bank, like commercial loan officers and credit administration staff, can access, allows the bank to set loan exceptions, clears them and finalizes the documentation so it can be imaged and stored in the correct location. Staffers that devoted an entire day to cumbersome reconciliation tasks now spend a few hours reviewing documentation.

Bucher was also impressed by the fintech’s approach to implementation and post-launch partnership. The bank is close enough to Teslar Software’s headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, that founder and CEO Joe Ehrhardt participated in the bank’s implementation kickoff. Teslar Software’s team is comprised of former bankers who leveraged that familiarity in designing the user’s experience. Between February and June of 2020, the earliest months of the coronavirus pandemic, Teslar Software built the loan performance reports that Liberty National needed, and made sure the core and platform communicated correctly. Weekly calls ensured that implementation was on track and the reports populated the correct data.

Teslar Software’s platform went live at Liberty National in June — missing the bulk of the bank’s first-round PPP loan issuance. But Teslar Software partnered with Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond, and tech entrepreneur and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to power a separate website called PPP.bank, a free, secure resource for multiple banks to serve PPP borrowers.

“Teslar Software came to the rescue when they provided their Paycheck Protection Program application tool to all community banks during a period of extreme uncertainty for small businesses due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Castilla says in a statement to Bank Director. “The partnership we forged with them and Mark Cuban was a game changer for so many that were in distress.”

And Liberty National was able to use Teslar Software’s platform to create and process forgiveness applications for the 500 first-round PPP loans it made. Bucher says the forgiveness application platform is similar to the tax preparation software TurboTax — it breaks the complex application down into digestible sections and prompts borrowers to submit required documents to a secure portal. The bank needs only one employee to review these applications.

“We had such a good experience with the forgiveness side that for PPP in 2021, we partnered with them to handle the front end and the back end of PPP [application],” he says. “It’s now all centralized within Teslar so that when we move on to forgiveness, everything is going to be there. I’m expecting the next round of forgiveness to go a lot smoother than the previous round.”

Outside of PPP, Teslar Software has allowed Liberty National’s credit administration team to manage its current workload, even as staffing decreased from 10 people to six. Instead of taking a full day to review and verify loan exceptions, it takes only a few hours. Bucher says the bank is exploring an expanded relationship with the fintech to add additional workflow modules that would reduce duplication and eliminate the use of email to share documents.

Fraud Attempts on the Rise Since Pandemic’s Start

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As Covid-19 passes its one year anniversary in the United States, businesses are still adjusting to the pandemic’s impacts on their industry.

Banking is no exception. While banks have quickly adjusted to new initiatives like the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, the most notable impact to financial institutions has been the demand for online capabilities. Banks needed to adjust their offerings to ensure they didn’t lose their client base.

“ATM activity is up, drive-through banking is up 10% to 20% and deposits made through our mobile app are up 40%,” said Dale Oberkfell, president and CFO of Midwest Bank Centre last June.

The shift to digital account openings has been drastic. The chart below looks at the percent change in cumulative number of evaluations from 2019 to 2020 for a cohort of Alloy customers, limited to organizations that were clients for both years. Since the onset of the pandemic, digital account opening has increased year-over-year by at least 25%.

Although the shift to digital was necessary to meet consumer demands, online banking opens up the possibility of new types of fraud. To study the pandemic’s impact on fraudulent applications, we took a closer look at changes in consumer risk scores since the onset of the pandemic. Similar to credit scores, risk scores predict the likelihood of identity or synthetic fraud based on discrepancies in information provided, behavioral characteristics and consortium data about past fraud activity.

Comparing the pandemic months of March 2020 to December 2020 to the same period in 2019, Alloy clients saw a dramatic rise in high-risk applications. Total high-risk applications increased by 137%, driven both by overall growth in digital application volume and a comparatively riskier population of applicants.

There are several ways for you to protect your organization against this growing threat. One way is to use multiple data sources to create a more holistic understanding of your applicants and identify risky behaviors. It also ensures that you are not falling victim to compromised data from any one source. It’s a universal best practice; Alloy customers use, on average, at least 4 data sources.

Another way for you to protect your institution is by using an identity decisioning platform to understand and report on trends in your customer’s application data. Many data providers will return the values that triggered higher fraud scores, such as email and device type. An identity decisioning platform can store that data for future reference. So, even if a risky application is approved at onboarding, you can continue to monitor it throughout its lifetime with you.

Digital banking adoption and usage is expected to only increase in the future. Banks need to ensure that their processes for online capabilities are continuously improving. If your organization is spending too much time running manual reviews or using an in-house technology, it may be time for an upgrade. Click here to see how an identity decisioning platform can improve your process and help you on-board more legitimate customers.

Pandemic-Induced Innovation Charts Path Toward New Normal

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As the financial institutions industry embarks on 2021, our reflections capture a world disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Economic uncertainty continues to impact strategic and growth plans for an inestimable period of time. Banks are closely monitoring loan payment trends and deposit account fluctuations as customers continue to struggle with stable employment and small businesses fight to survive.

The Covid-19 crisis occurred at a time of strength for most financial institutions. Unlike the 2008 Great Recession, banks have been able to rely on strong capital positions, which was crucial when it became no longer possible to continue operating business as usual.

Essentially overnight, consumer behavior shifted away from most face-to-face interactions, prompting an increase in online and contactless activity. Banks had to quickly adapt and explore innovation in order to meet both customer and employee needs. Outdated manual processes, continuity vulnerabilities and antiquated methods of communication immediately became apparent, with institutions pivoting to operate effectively. The pandemic became an accelerant and forced banks to embrace innovation to avoid business interruption, while prioritizing information security and employee and customer safety. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the Covid-19 pandemic created necessity — with an emphasis on urgency.

Top Five Covid-19 Challenges That Prompted Innovation

  1. To reduce the potential virus spread, executives found alternative means of meeting and interacting with employees and customers. Virtual meetings were the solution for many banks.
  2. While many institutions allowed for some remote work, this was not permitted for most employees prior to the pandemic. In some cases, chief technology officers had to quickly implement secure VPN access, evaluate hardware availability, order laptops and expand upon remote working policies and procedures.
  3. Digital transformation immediately moved from “wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to “to be competitive and survive we must accomplish this immediately.” No. 1 on the transformation list was enhancing the customer experience. To remain competitive, transformation was no longer optional but absolutely required. Digital channels have been trending as customers’ preferred way to bank in the last few years, but this became the primary channel for customer engagement out of necessity. This shift prompted banks to reevaluate and enhance digital channel offerings along with supporting technologies.
  4. Round one of the Paycheck Protection Program was a difficult, labor-intensive process for participating institutions. The need for an efficient PPP application process prompted lenders of all sizes to embrace automation and fintech partnerships, resulting in a smoother process during round two.
  5. C-suite executives and bankers across the organization found themselves in a position where it was difficult to access information quickly and easily in order to make timely decisions to improve the customer experience and manage the bank. For many institutions, especially community financial institutions, this continues to be a challenge.

The need for accurate and efficiently delivered information and data across the organization has never been so great. It is still quite common for financial institutions to manage information in data silos, making it impossible to create the contextual customer intelligence necessary to compete in the post-pandemic environment. Financial institutions have the most intimate data about their customers. This data is of little value until it is transformed into meaningful information that can be easily digested, interpreted, and acted upon.

Banks that recognize that their data is a valuable asset are actively seeking out intelligent analytics tools to create contextual customer intelligence that can be strategically deployed across the organization and leveraged for consistent multichannel experiences to generate sales, increase customer and employee loyalty and reduce operating expenses. Financial institutions must have the ability to gather, aggregate and analyze their complex data assets quickly and accurately to remain competitive, meet regulatory reporting expectations and to achieve market success. The ability to analyze this data and act decisively is the path to not only being a better financial institution but prospering in uncertain times. Leveraging high-value data is imperative to thriving and increasing an institution’s competitive advantage.

A Look at the Great Loan Modification Experiment

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After almost a year, Congress’ decision to suspend loan modifications rules was an unprecedented, unorthodox and, ultimately, effective way to aid banks and borrowers.

The banking industry is going on four quarters of suspended requirements for coronavirus loan modifications. Suspending the reporting rules around loan modifications was a creative way for regulators and lawmakers to encourage banks in the spring of 2020 to work with borrowers facing coronavirus-related hardships. The result is that the industry, and economy, had more time to reassess the rapidly uncertain environment before needing to process troubled credits.

“Standing here today, having completed most of my year in audit and having a pretty good idea of how things are panning out — I would call it a raging success,” says Mandi Simpson, a partner in Crowe’s audit group. She adds that the decision to pause loan payments may have helped avoid a number of business closures and foreclosures, which will help the economy stabilize and recover long-term.

Ordinarily, these modifications, like no payments or interest-only payments for a period of time before restarting payments and catching up, would have been categorized as troubled debt restructurings, or TDRs, under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.

TDRs occur after a bank offers a concession on a credit that it wouldn’t otherwise make to a borrower experiencing financial difficulties or hardship. The CARES Act suspended the determination that a loan modified because of the coronavirus would count as a TDR, “including impairment for accounting purposes.” Banks could now offer deferments and modifications to borrowers impacted by the coronavirus without needing to record them as TDRs.

The suspension came as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of 2020, or CARES Act, and was extended in the stimulus bill passed before the end of the year. The move was supported by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Accounting Standards Board and bank regulators, who had encouraged banks to work with borrowers prior to the suspension. It is scheduled to be in effect through until Jan. 1, 2022, or 60 days after the termination of the national emergency, whichever is earlier.

“The regulatory community gets a high-five for that, in my opinion,” says Christopher Marinac, director of research at Janney Montgomery Scott. “Think about the accounting change in TDRs as another form of stimulus … For the companies and the clients that received deferrals – this pandemic is not their fault. … There was a recognition that this gave people a way to buy time. The one variable you can’t quantify in a crisis is time.”

The widespread forbearance allowed borrowers to adapt their businesses, get a handle on their finances or apply for Paycheck Protection Program funding from the Small Business Administration. It also gave banks a chance to reassess their borrowers’ evolving risk and offer new loan terms, if needed.

Reported Bank Deferral Data for 2020

Quarter Loans in deferral, median Low range High range Number of banks reporting
Q1’2020 11.1% 0.3% 38% 224
Q2’2020 15.3% 1.2% 46.4% 234
Q3’2020 3% 0% 21.5% 240
Q4’2020 1.4% 0% 14.5% 238

Source: Reports authored by Brad Milsaps, managing director at Piper Sandler & Co.

A number of institutions took advantage of the suspension to offer borrowers relief. Simpson remembers that many banks freely offered short-term forbearance in the second quarter, and panicked borrowers accepted. When those forbearance periods expired in the third quarter, borrowers had a better sense of their financial condition — aided by the PPP — and banks were better prepared to work with customers under continued pressure.

By the end of the second quarter, most banks “expressed optimism” about the direction of deferrals and reported “minimal” second requests, mostly related to restaurant and hotel borrowers, wrote Brad Milsaps, managing director at Piper Sandler & Co.

He expected deferrals to become “less of a focus going forward,” as those loans’ performance normalized or banks felt confident in marking them as nonaccruals. To that end, the median ratio of criticized loans to total loans, excluding Paycheck Protection Program loans, increased to 3.6% at the end of the third quarter, from 2.9% in the second quarter.

“Deferrals were an impactful tool utilized at the beginning of the pandemic, but have fallen to a very minimal level given the impact of PPP, the CARES Act, and improvement in the economy,” he wrote in a February 2021 report. “Although deferral data continues to be disclosed by most banks, the investment community has mostly moved on from deferrals as an area of primary focus.”

But the suspension of TDR guidance is not a green light for banks to wholly ignore changing credit risk. If anything, the year of deferrals gave banks a better sense of which customers faced outsized challenges to their businesses and whether they could reasonably and soundly continue supporting the relationship. Marinac points out that many banks have risk-rated loans that received modifications, set aside reserves for potential losses and migrated those that continued to have stress over time.

And as documented in Milsaps’ reports, a number of banks decided to share their modification activity with the broader public, with many including geography, industry and sometimes even the type of modification offered. These disclosures weren’t required by regulators but demonstrated the credit strength at many banks and reassured investors that banks had a handle on their credit risk.

The suspension of TDR reporting requirements through the end of 2021 gives the industry and stakeholders like FASB, the accounting board FASB, to consider the usefulness of the existing TDR guidance.

The reporting involved with TDRs involves an individual discounted cash flow analysis, which makes the accounting complicated and tedious. TDRs also can carry negative connotations that are impossible to shake: A modified TDR, even if it’s performing, is always recorded as a TDR. Simpson points out that the loan modification disclosures banks made in lieu of reporting TDRs was, in many cases, more useful and insightful than if the banks had just treated all modified loans as TDRs. And while mass loan modifications may have been a lot of work for banks in the midst of the pandemic’s most uncertain days, it would have been exponentially more complicated to do mass restructuring recordings and discount cash flow analyses over those four quarters.

“If you aren’t going to do TDR reporting at the time when — in theory — it would be the most valuable, doesn’t that call into question whether TDR identification is really that useful after all?” Simpson asks. “The standard-setters are doing some outreach and taking a second look with exactly that in mind.”

How Community Banks Can Drive Revenue Growth During the Pandemic

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Community banks are the beating heart of the American banking system — and they’ve received a major jolt to their system.

While community banks represent only 17% of the US banking system, they are responsible for around 53% of small business loans. Lending to small businesses calls for relationship skills: Unlike lending to large firms, there is seldom detailed credit information available. Lending decisions are often based on intangible qualities of borrowers.

While community banking is relationship lending at its very best, the pandemic is forcing change. Community bankers have been caught in the eye of the Covid-19 storm, providing lifesaving financial services to small businesses. They helped fuel the success of the Paycheck Protection Program, administering around 60% of total first wave loans, according to Forbes. This was no small feat: Community banks administered more loans in four weeks than the grup had in the previous 12 months.

However, as with many businesses, they have been forced to close their doors for extended periods and move many employees to remote arrangements. Customers have been forced to move to online channels, forming new banking habits. Community banks have risen to all these challenges.

But the pandemic has also shown how technology can augment relationship banking, increase customer engagement and drive revenue growth. Many community banks are doing things differently, acknowledging the need to do things in new ways to drive new revenues.

Even before Covid-19, disruptive forces were reshaping the global banking landscape. Customers have high expectations, and have become accustomed to engaging online and through mobile services. Technology innovators have redefined what’s possible; customers now expect recommendations based on their personal data and previous behavior. Many believe that engaging with their bank should be as easy as buying a book or travel ticket.

Turn Data into Insights, Rewards
While a nimble, human approach and personal service may offset a technical shortcoming in the short run, it cannot offset a growing technology debt and lack of innovation. Data is becoming  the universal driver of banking success. Community banks need to use data and analytics to find new opportunities.

Customer data, like spending habits, can be turned into business insights that empower banks to deliver services where and when they are most needed. Banks can also harness the power of data to anticipate customer life moments, such as a student loan, wedding or a home purchase.

Data can also drive a relevant reward program that improves the customer experience and increases the bank’s brand. Rewards reinforce desired customer behavior, boost loyalty and ultimately improve margins. For example, encouraging and rewarding additional debit transaction activity can drive fee income, while increasing core deposits improves lending margins.

The pandemic also highlights the primacy of digital transformation. With branches closed, banks need to find new ways to interact with customers. Digital services and digitalization allow customers to self-serve but also create opportunities to engage further, adding value with financial wellness products through upselling and cross-selling. In recent months, some community banks launched “video tellers” to offset closed branches. Although these features required investment, they are essential to drive new business and customers will expect these services to endure.

With the right digital infrastructure, possibilities are limited only by the imagination. But it’s useful to remember that today’s competitive advantage quickly becomes tomorrow’s banking baseline. Pre-pandemic, there was limited interest in online account opening; now it’s a crucial building block of an engaging digital experience. Banking has become a technology business — but technology works best with people. Community banks must invest in technologies to augment, deepen and expand profitable relationships.

Leverage Transformative Partnership
Technology driven transformation is never easy — but it’s a lot easier with an expert partner. With their loyal customers, trusted brands and their reputation for responsiveness, community banks start from a strong position, but they need to invest in a digital future. The right partner can help community banks transform to stay relevant, agile and profitable. Modern technologies can make banking more competitive and democratic to ensure community banks continue to compete with greater customer insights, relevant rewards programs and strong digital offerings.

When combined, these build on the customer service foundation at the core of community banking.