Boardroom Battle

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The following feature appeared in the second quarter 2023 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.

Few banks can tout a success story as enviable as Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based Commerce Bancorp.

Anyone who invested in Commerce back in 1973, when Vernon Hill II founded the bank, saw their investment grow 470 times by 2007, when the bank sold to TD Bank Financial Group, he says. “The 34-year annual return to our shareholders was 23% a year. … If you look at the growth numbers of Commerce, there was nobody even close to it.” The bank went from a single location with just nine employees to almost $50 billion in assets, more than 12,000 employees and 470 branches — or stores, as Hill calls them.

It accomplished this by focusing on growth, at a rate of $18 million in deposits annually, according to Hill. A “Philadelphia” magazine article from 2006, titled “Vernon the Barbarian,” described Hill rallying his troops — the thousands of bank employees attending the company’s “Wow” awards, which gave out honors such as “Best Teller.” With employees cheering him on, he told the crowd, “Most of you know that each year, we go and save another part of America that’s not served by Commerce.” A Lehman Brothers analyst covering the bank at the time likened its expansion to “the Mongolian horde coming across the plains, threatening the Roman Empire.”

Commerce won so many customer accounts because it focused on taking a retail approach to banking, offering a high level of service. Billed as “America’s Most Convenient Bank,” Commerce branches were open seven days a week. They welcomed dogs in branches and gave out dog biscuits. And Hill isn’t a cost-cutter — he likes his branches to be well designed, in the best locations and stocked with free pens that advertise the bank. Hill boasts that Commerce gave away 28 million pens a month to anyone who came in the branch.

But the years since have been fraught with trouble. Described as the “greatest retail banker of our lifetime,” Hill has been embroiled in lawsuits, a boardroom battle, regulatory actions and activist campaigns. Hill hasn’t been able to create the same magic since, and shareholders have suffered.

In 2007, Hill lost his job at Commerce under pressure from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Hill had used a real estate firm he owned with family members to scout locations for Commerce branches; his wife’s design firm, InterArch, was contracted for the company’s design and branding. The OCC placed restrictions on related-party transactions that would have prolonged the branch application process.

Months later, TD announced that it would acquire Commerce in an $8.5 billion transaction. The deal was an important step in the Canadian bank’s own growth in the U.S., doubling its U.S. footprint. TD kept the “America’s Most Convenient Bank” slogan, which it uses to this day.

As an investor with more than 6 million Commerce shares, Hill had done well for himself. But after more than three decades running a bank, he suddenly had nothing to do. “I couldn’t work for somebody else,” he tells me. So in 2008, Hill invested in sleepy little Republic First Bancorp, a small competitor to Commerce that at the time had less than $1 billion in assets and a handful of branches primarily centered around its headquarters in Philadelphia. He began acting as an advisor to the bank’s leaders, including then-CEO and founder Harry Madonna. Then two years later, in 2010, he crossed the pond to found Metro Bank in the U.K., leveraging the same model that made Commerce a success.

At Metro Bank, the stock saw steady growth from its 2016 IPO before going into a free fall in the latter half of 2018; it hasn’t recovered. Republic’s stock has also been beleaguered. Back in the Commerce days, Hill’s customer-friendly, growth-focused approach was revolutionary. His friend, longtime bank investor Tom Brown, is the one who describes him as the “greatest retail banker of our lifetime.” But even he admits Hill can have a difficult personality.

David Slackman, a former Commerce executive, believes Hill is often misunderstood. “Vernon is extremely confident in the model and extremely confident in his ability to be successful with it, and can therefore sometimes come across as seeming inflexible,” he says. He describes Hill as an exact but supportive and loyal boss who ended conversations with his top officers by saying, “Don’t do anything stupid.” That was a warning not to stray away from the Commerce model, Slackman recalls.

“My personality is strong,” Hill says. Commerce was frequently compared to Apple back in the day, which was run by another passionate business leader, Steve Jobs. It’s clear — from talking to Hill, reading his books and digging into his banks — that he’s committed to his approach to banking.

But relationships devolved at Republic over the years. Madonna says Hill — who eventually became CEO before resigning 18 months later — held his bank hostage due to a perfect split in the boardroom: three directors backing Hill, and four backing Madonna. Madonna says Hill operated without effective board oversight due to the division in the boardroom.

But in a lawsuit filed against Republic and Madonna’s faction of directors, Hill and former director Barry Spevak contend that it was Madonna’s group that had the board deadlocked, with Hill’s directors “intentionally and systematically prevented” from participating in board deliberations.

Back before that became an issue, in 2008, Republic needed capital, and it needed a new direction. Like many banks in the financial crisis, Republic had experienced losses in its loan portfolio, says Frank Schiraldi, a managing director and senior research analyst at Piper Sandler & Co. “Vernon came along as really a savior,” he explains. Hill says he invested $6 million. “With [Hill] now being a large owner, he had the opportunity to push his old Commerce strategy as sort of a reboot. And initially, it was very well received.” Madonna describes Republic in those days as a “garden-variety community bank.” He says Hill persuaded him to turn Republic into a “deposit-driven organization” with an expanded branch footprint. Hill’s ownership gained him the right to designate a board member, Theodore Flocco Jr. — a former senior audit partner at Ernst & Young who had advised Commerce, and someone Hill considered a friend.

“When I invested in Republic, they were a broken bank, troubled. They needed capital, they needed [our] model, they needed people,” says Hill. “I came in and invested on the terms that I would install — with their approval — what we call ‘The Power of Red.’” Hill’s branding campaign eventually included a big red ‘R’ for Republic; Commerce had a similar big red ‘C.’

“It was an opportunity for me to invest and use the Commerce model to expand Republic and serve the same markets we had served at Commerce,” he says. But, “it’s harder to convert something than it is to build it from scratch.”

Meanwhile, Madonna was still running Republic while Hill was in London recreating the old Commerce model from the ground up at Metro Bank. And he was doing that with Shirley Hill, his wife and “branding queen” who owned the firm InterArch, responsible for branding, marketing and design at Hill’s banks — Commerce, Republic and Metro.

Hill describes his wife’s involvement as a whole package adding value, similar to the way Apple designs its products and experience. “She does architecture, construction, marketing and branding. And the value of that is not one branch. It’s all united together,” explains Hill. Metro paid InterArch over £20 million over the five-year period preceding the Hills’ departure in 2019, according to the bank’s annual reports.

“Everybody knows we have to get third-party reviews on the pricing,” Hill says of the InterArch relationship, something that occurred at both banks.

Hill stresses that InterArch was worth every penny and just as important to his banking model as his dog, Sir Duffield II, or Duffy — a Yorkshire terrier who has featured heavily in promotions for Republic and Metro. “My dog’s more well known than me,” Hill jokes. At Metro, Duffy joined the Hills in welcoming customers — and their dogs — at the bank’s grand openings. A Duffy float made its way through London parades. The Yorkie even had a column in the bank’s newsletter, and a Twitter account featuring him visiting bank branches and dining with Ann Coulter. “Everybody knows Duffy; he goes everywhere,” says Hill. The dog-friendly branches also appealed to customers, he says. “The customers take that to mean, ‘If you love my dog, you must love me.’”

It was the original Sir Duffield, visiting a competing bank’s branch with Shirley Hill in 2001, who inspired Vernon Hill’s dog-friendly approach. She was stopped at the front door and told that her pup wasn’t allowed. Hill decided being open to dogs was another way to disrupt banking and set his banks apart.

Despite the known issues around related-party transactions, Republic offered Hill the chair role in 2016, ramping up his involvement with the bank. “We were very aware of his relationship,” says Madonna. “Consultants were brought in to look at the contracts, to make sure they were fair market value, and that things were done in accordance with laws and regulations, and that they were in the best interest of the bank.” InterArch billed Republic $2.2 million for marketing, design and similar services from 2019 through 2021, according to an SEC filing.

Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, sees a huge conflict for any public company doing business with a spouse or family member of a CEO or director — even if all parties appear satisfied with the arrangement. “You’re going to face all kinds of accusations of unfair dealing,” he says. “I can’t imagine a board being counseled that it was OK to do that. That’s strange.”

But while Hill was chairman, he was still spending most of his time in Europe building Metro Bank, according to Madonna. That changed in 2019, with Hill’s resignation from the U.K. bank after Metro disclosed that it had misclassified commercial loans, leading to a £900 million increase in risk-weighted assets. Put simply, Metro classified those loans as less risky than regulators thought they were; riskier loans require more capital.

Metro Bank shares dropped precipitously when the bank disclosed the issues in January and continued to fall through the year. The stock peaked at more than £40 in March 2018; it was valued at less than £1.50 as of Feb. 28, 2023, on the heels of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. Shareholders began calling for Hill’s resignation; he stepped down as Metro’s chairman in October 2019, and resigned from the board by the end of the year — along with Metro CEO Craig Donaldson, who’d run the bank by Hill’s side since its founding in 2010. “It was a misinterpretation of the rules,” Donaldson told Bloomberg at the time, calling it an “isolated incident” that the bank was seeking to rectify.

Issues with the bank’s regulators took years to resolve, and included a £5.4 million penalty to the Prudential Regulation Authority and a £10 million fine to the Financial Conduct Authority.

“What happened in London really didn’t involve me,” Hill says. “Their capital system [in the U.K.] is way different than ours; there was nothing about our model.”

Following his departure from Metro, Hill became increasingly involved in day-to-day operations and decision-making at Republic. “He really was trying even harder to prove that what he was doing [at] Metro Bank was right and not wrong, and he doubled down on pushing for more and more deposits that we couldn’t put to use,” Madonna says. “That’s when it turned hostile.”

The Paycheck Protection Program — in many ways a boon to community banks in 2020 — revealed divides in the Republic boardroom. Madonna says he and some of the other directors wanted to use the influx in deposits from PPP loan customers to return expensive government funding, reducing the bank’s costs and improving its loan-to-deposit ratio. “Instead, [Hill] went out and purchased a lot of long-term, mortgage-backed securities” at low interest rates, Madonna says. Loans were already a low percentage of the bank’s assets compared to peer institutions, due to Hill’s preference to leverage securities.

Much like institutions with long-term, low rate bonds and securities on the books, Republic First was negatively affected when the Federal Reserve began its series of inflation-fighting interest rate increases in early 2022. Republic’s accumulated other comprehensive income, influenced by bond prices, amounted to a negative $148 million as of Dec. 31, 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence; securities accounted for 43% of the bank’s assets.

“When you have a lot of low-cost deposits, you look at ways to invest it. Sometimes you make loans; sometimes you buy bonds,” says Hill. The bank couldn’t safely grow loans as fast as it could grow deposits; he favored government mortgage-backed securities as an alternative to loan generation. “When you have excess funding, what do you do with it? In the current environment, buying government mortgage-backed securities is the best way,” Hill says.

The AOCI effects plaguing many banks are more pronounced at Republic due to its model, says Schiraldi.
Beyond the bank’s securities portfolio, Hill wanted to build expensive, $7 million branches, according to Madonna — significantly more expensive than the average branch cost of $1.8 million, per a 2019 survey by the consulting firm Bancography.

But Hill has a different view. “The retailers that win in life are the ones that have the highest sales per store,” Hill says, adding that deposits per branch at Republic were “extremely high.” Deposits were growing, he adds, by around $30 million a year per branch. In its 2021 annual report, Republic reported deposit growth over the prior three years at an average 30% annually.

But profitability metrics had been abysmally low for years and didn’t appear to be improving. In Bank Director’s annual performance rankings dating back to 2015 — the year before Hill became chairman — Republic has appeared toward the bottom of its peer group year after year.

Up until 2020, Madonna says the board was collegial. But some directors, including Madonna, were beginning to believe that Hill’s strategy wasn’t working. “It was our fiduciary obligation to periodically look at what the strategic alternatives were for the bank,” Madonna says. Hill alleges that the group wanted to sell the bank, something he vehemently opposed. Madonna says while this option wasn’t off the table, they weren’t seeking a buyer. But Madonna’s group of board members was growing skeptical of what he calls “extremely optimistic” forecasts put forth by Hill. “It was just growth, growth, growth,” says Madonna. “He had three directors that no matter what he said, they put their hands up and said, ‘Yes.’”

“The board meetings became poisonous,” he adds. Madonna describes deliberations as “personal and hostile.”

Directors felt they couldn’t ask questions, he says, claiming that Hill would leave the meeting or refuse to answer. “[H]e wasn’t a person who knew how to discuss things in a reasonable manner. He had his model, and everything had to fit his model.” Directors received the agenda the day before meetings, Madonna alleges.

Hill sees things differently, telling me that directors were prepared and involved. “We were active in moving our business plan along; we had multi-year plans,” he says. Directors may have debated and even disagreed on matters, but Hill characterizes meetings as “generally OK.”

But Madonna says that by February 2021, he had had enough — so, he stepped down as CEO and handed the reins to Hill.

Why make Hill CEO? Madonna says he was fed up with management receiving two sets of instructions, one from Hill and the other from Madonna. “You can’t run a bank that way,” says Madonna. “I said, ‘Hey, you want to run it, you run it.’” Madonna remained president and chairman emeritus of the holding company board.

Investors had noted Republic’s woes. Driver Management Co. — no stranger to running activist campaigns at community banks — had started purchasing the stock in October 2021. “We focus on banks where there is value that needs to be unlocked,” says Abbott Cooper, Driver’s founder and managing member.

Through 2022, the bank’s total shareholder return from 2016 — when Hill was elected chair — was down 50.3%, according to Schiraldi. Driver was soon joined by another investor group intent on pushing Hill out, led by George Norcross III, Gregory Braca and Philip Norcross. Both George Norcross and Braca worked under Hill back in the Commerce days. George led the bank’s insurance brokerage and served on the company’s board. Braca stayed with TD following the acquisition, eventually becoming CEO of TD’s U.S. operations.

Braca and the Norcross brothers — both influential in New Jersey politics — saw a struggling bank in a familiar footprint: Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. “With the right leadership, the right oversight and governance, the right strategy, this could be a winning organization,” says Braca. Like Driver, the Norcross brothers and Braca wanted Hill out — but they wanted Braca in as CEO.

As the Norcrosses and Braca escalated their campaign, the division in the boardroom became public. Madonna — with fellow board members Andrew Cohen, Lisa Jacobs and Harris Wildstein — issued a press release in March 2022, stating their concerns about “potential harmful actions” by the other half of the board. They asked that several proposals be tabled until after the 2022 annual shareholder meeting, including agreements around services provided by Shirley Hill’s firm, InterArch; the opening and renovation of new branches; and augmented severance payments connected to Hill’s service on the board and as CEO.

In the defamation lawsuit filed against Republic and Madonna’s faction, Hill and Spevak called the accusations levied by that group “knowingly false and defamatory,” noting that the board had approved the contract for InterArch year after year and that the opening of two new branches had been authorized years earlier.

As Elson points out, it’s hard for a board to get anything done when it’s split evenly between two factions.

Republic’s annual meeting, last held in April 2021, had been postponed. But the stalemate broke on May 11, 2022, with the death of Flocco, the board member and Hill’s longtime friend. Just two days later, the Madonna majority appointed him as interim chairman; Hill remained CEO and a member of the board. The battle wasn’t over — litigation followed, with the directors suing each other — but Flocco’s death spelled the beginning of the end for Vernon Hill’s tenure at Republic. Legal issues that stalled Madonna’s re-appointment as chairman were resolved in late June, favoring the Madonna faction. Hill stepped down as CEO, and the directors who had voted with Hill left the board.

Tom Geisel, the former CEO of Sun Bancorp and executive at Webster Financial Corp., was named CEO by the end of the year. Madonna says the company now aims to slow the growth, restructure the balance sheet and rein in costs.

But things remain unsettled at Republic. Driver resolved its activist campaign with the appointment of former Texas Capital Bancshares executive Peter Bartholow to the now seven-member Republic board. Late in 2022, Hill sued Republic over the continued use of the branding elements developed by InterArch for the bank, some of which featured Hill and Duffy. Madonna tells me Republic has moved away from Hill’s marketing style — though the big red ‘R’ remains.

And the Norcrosses and Braca still want a seat at the table. As of Feb. 27, 2023, the group proposed purchasing $100 million in stock, with board seats commensurate with its stake in the bank. But they’re willing to wait and see how Geisel performs as CEO. “You can’t just blame Vernon … at least he had a growth strategy,” says Braca. “Before [Hill], this was a sleepy little bank that had basically no growth.” He blames the legacy board, and questions whether Geisel will be empowered to effectively raise capital and turn the bank around, citing the lingering issues with Republic’s bond portfolio. “It’s a troubled situation, and it’s exactly why another bank can’t buy this place, because of the mark-to-market issues on that bond portfolio,” he says. “This was a board that oversaw a strategy that said, ‘We’re going to increase our costs and expenses, [and] raise deposits at a premium to what everyone else was paying at the time, which was nearly nothing.’ This was a board that oversaw all this.”

The bank still hasn’t held an annual meeting when this issue went to press, and it’s playing catch-up on its quarterly filings. Nasdaq has threatened to delist the stock as a result. On March 10, Republic announced a $125 million investment from a group that includes Castle Creek Capital; the asset manager will have the right to appoint a director.

And the board division has taken its toll on investors. Those include Hill, who owned almost 10% of the stock in March, and Madonna, but they also include smaller owners who truly believed in Hill’s vision. In the bank’s first quarter 2021 earnings call, a shareholder recalled a personal connection with Commerce. “Vernon, from the beginning, my mother used to work for you … I’ve been in the bank a long time. I’ve lost a lot of money.”

Earnings Are High but Bank Stock Prices Are Low

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Banks are doing very well, if you look at credit quality and profitability. But tell that to investors.

Last week, the Federal Open Market Committee raised the target federal funds rate by 75 basis points, the third hike of that magnitude in a row, to combat inflation.

The market has punished equities lately in response, but even more so, bank stocks, probably in anticipation of a recession that may have arrived. The S&P 500 fell 21.61% in 2022 as of Friday, Sept. 23, but the S&P U.S. large cap bank index was down 25.19% in that same time frame, according to Mercer Capital using S&P Global Market Intelligence data. By asset size, large banks have seen the biggest declines so far this year.

Going back further in time, the cumulative return for U.S. bank stocks in general, as measured by the S&P U.S. BMI Banks index, was down 5.30% as of Sept. 22 from the start of 2020, compared to a gain of 21.55% for the S&P 500.

Investors’ dim view of bank stocks belies the underlying strengths of many of these banks. Bank net income of $64.4 billion in the second quarter was higher than it had been in the same quarter of 2018 and 2019, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Since 2019, in fact, bank profitability has been going gangbusters. Rising interest rates improved net interest margins, a key profitability statistic for many banks. Plus, loan growth has been good.

And credit quality remains high, as measured by the noncurrent loan and quarterly net charge-off rates at banks, important bank metrics tracked by the FDIC. Despite weaknesses in mortgage and wealth management, this combination of variables has made many banks more profitable than they were in 2018 or 2019.

“Earnings are excellent right now, and they’re going to be even better in the third and fourth quarter as these margins expand,” says Jeff Davis, managing director of Mercer Capital’s financial institutions group.

Investors don’t seem to care. “It’s been a real frustration and a real incongruity between stock prices and what’s going on with fundamentals,” says R. Scott Siefers, managing director and senior research analyst at Piper Sandler & Co. “You’ve had a year of really great revenue growth, and really great profitability, and at least for the time being, that should continue. So that’s the good news. The bad news is, of course, that investors aren’t really as concerned with what’s going on today.”

Worries about a possible recession are sending investors away from bank stocks, even as analysts join Davis in his prediction of a pretty good third and fourth quarter for earnings this year. The reason is that investors view banks as sensitive to the broader economy, Siefers says, and think asset quality will deteriorate and the costs of deposits will rise eventually.

The place to see this play out is in two ratios: price to earnings and price to tangible book value. Interestingly, price to tangible book value ratios have remained strong — probably a function of deteriorating bond values in bank securities’ portfolios, which is bringing down tangible book values in line with falling stock prices. As a result, the average price to tangible book value as of Sept. 23 was 1.86x for large regional bank stocks and 1.7x for banks in the $10 billion to $50 billion asset range, according to Mercer Capital.

Meanwhile, price to earnings ratios are falling. The average price to earnings ratio for the last four quarters was 10.3x for large regional banks, and 11.4x for mid-sized bank stocks. (By way of comparison, the 10-year average for large cap bank stocks was 13.4x and 14.6x for mid cap bank stocks, respectively.)

For bank management teams and the boards that oversee them, the industry is entering a difficult time when decisions about capital management will be crucial. Banks still are seeing loan growth, and for the most part, higher earnings are generating a fair amount of capital, says Rick Childs, a partner at the tax and consulting firm Crowe LLP. But what to do with that capital?

This might be the perfect time to buy back stock, when prices are low, but that depletes capital that might be needed in a recession and such action might be viewed poorly by markets, Childs says. Davis agrees. A lot of companies can’t or won’t buy back their own stock when it’s gotten cheap, he says. “If we don’t have a nasty recession next year, a lot of these stocks are probably pretty good or very good purchases,” he says. “If we have a nasty recession, you’ll wish you had the capital.”

It’s tricky to raise dividends for the same reason. Most banks shy away from cutting dividends, because that would hurt investors, and try to manage to keep the dividend rate consistent, Childs says.

And in terms of lending, banks most certainly will want to continue lending to borrowers with good credit, but may exercise caution when it comes to riskier categories, Davis says. Capital management going forward won’t be easy. “If next year’s nasty, there’s nothing they can do because they’re stuck with what’s on the balance sheet,” he says. The next year or two may prove which bank management teams made the right decisions.

How to Find the Right Title Service Provider

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In a highly competitive market, bank title service providers can have a tangible impact on business outcomes. Below are several considerations for selecting a title provider who can help institutions navigate today’s challenging market.

Stability
It’s important to know that the title provider your bank selects remains consistent, whether the market is up or down. Decades of experience, minimal claims and strong financial backing all contribute to the stability of a settlement service provider. “There’s an element of risk lenders can avoid by working with a title partner that has a history of producing instant title with minimal claims. How long have they been doing it?” says Jim Gladden, senior vice president of origination strategy at ServiceLink. “What does their track record look like?”

Service
Each file matters. After all, a home is likely your borrower’s biggest investment; making sure a purchase, refinance or home equity transaction goes smoothly is critical. For that reason, it’s important to ensure that title service providers take the unique needs of the bank’s team and borrowers into account, and prioritizes each transaction.

One way to do that is to work with a firm that dedicates individuals to working with the same lenders and loan officers, so they can understand the unique expectations each of them has, according to Kristy Folino, senior vice president of origination services at ServiceLink.

Prioritizing the Borrower Experience
The real estate lending industry is increasingly competitive; attracting and retaining borrowers is critical. Investigate how different title providers think about your borrowers, and whether their service ethos and technology prioritize the borrower throughout the transaction.

Check out the 2022 ServiceLink State of Homebuying Report to learn more about today’s borrowers. Dave Steinmetz, president of origination services at ServiceLink, says the study suggests a growing number of buyers embrace technology.

“Many are open to new pathways to achieve homeownership. This indicates there is an opportunity for lenders to provide more targeted resources and guidance to buyers throughout their home buying journey.”

Operational Efficiency
In leaner times, banks need to maximize margins on each transaction. Consider where your title service provider has automated their processes, and how that shows up in your bottom line. For example, instant title technology speeds decisioning and enables shorter rate lock periods by quickly clearing the way to the closing table. In fact, many lenders are surprised at how many of their loans qualify for fast-tracking through the instant title process.

Integrating technology and approaches like instant title into your processes could allow you to improve your workflows. Using instant title complexity decisions can help prioritize clear-to-close files, getting them to the closing table faster.

Scalability
In the past few years, the mortgage industry has seen how quickly volumes can change. In this volatile environment, it’s critical to partner with settlement service providers who can flex up or down with their financial institution partner as the market necessitates. The size of a provider’s signing agent panel impacts their scalability — as does their ability to allocate vendors to your operations at critical times, like month’s end.

Geographic Footprint
Being able to use one provider for transactions in all 50 states can simplify bank operations. Partnering with a title service provider with national scope ensures that a bank and its borrowers have a consistent experience, wherever they’re located. Gladden pointed out that national coverage is especially important for lenders with portfolios that are geographically diverse.

Security
Strict adherence to local, state and federal guidelines is critical to ensuring compliant transactions. Security around data must be airtight to protect lenders and their customers from potential breaches or other security incidents.

“Each title provider uses a platform that is aggregating both public and nonpublic consumer information. It’s important to know how that information is protected,” says Gladden.

Data quality
It’s important to look at the sources of title service providers’ data. While speed is essential, assurances from your title providers about data quality is paramount, particularly when it comes to instant title.

“The product is only as good as the data source, so the quality and depth of the data is the biggest factor to look out for. Instant title providers may all be racing toward the same goal, but the methodologies we’re using to get there — whether technologies, processes or the decisions we’re making — differ significantly,” says Sandeepa Sasimohan, vice president of title automation at ServiceLink.

Breadth of product offering
When you’re considering adding to your slate of providers, consider what value can be gained by onboarding a particular vendor. Banks that partner with organizations that offer a comprehensive suite of services — including uninsured and insured title products, flood and valuations — can benefit from increased efficiencies.

These considerations ladder up to one critical theme: partnership. Your title service provider should be a strategic ally who works alongside you to navigate market conditions.

The Promise and the Peril of Director Term Limits

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Bank boards seeking to refresh their membership may be tempted to consider term limits, but the blunt approach carries several downsides that they will need to address.

Term limit policies are one way that boards can navigate crucial, but sensitive, topics like board refreshment. They place a ceiling on a director’s tenure to force regular vacancies. Bringing on new members is essential for banks that have a skills or experience gap at the board level, or for banks that need to transform strategy in the future with the help of different directors. However, it can be awkward to implement such a policy. There are other tools that boards can use to deliver feedback and ascertain a director’s interest in continued service.

The average age of financial sector independent directors in the S&P 500 index was 64.1 years, according to the 2021 U.S. Spencer Stuart Board Index. The average tenure was 8.3 years. The longest tenured board in the financial sector was 16 years.

“I believe that any small bank under $1 billion in assets should adopt provisions to provide for term limits of perhaps 10 years for outside directors,” wrote one respondent in Bank Director’s 2022 Governance Best Practices Survey.

The idea has some fans in the banking industry. The board of directors at New York-based, $121 billion Signature Bank, which is known for its innovative business lines, adopted limits in 2018. The policy limits non-employee directors to 12 years cumulatively. The change came after discussions over several meetings about the need for refreshment as the board revisited its policies, says Scott Shay, chairman of the board and cofounder of the bank. Some directors were hesitant about the change — and what it might mean for their time on the board.

“In all candor, people had mixed views on it. But we kept talking about it,” he says. “And as the world is evolving and changing, [the question was: ‘How do] we get new insights and fresh blood onto the board over some period?’”

Ultimately, he says the directors were able to prioritize the bank’s needs and agree to the policy change. Since adopting the term limits, the board added three new independent directors who are all younger than directors serving before the change, according to the bank’s 2022 proxy statement. Two are women and one is Asian. Their skills and experience include international business, corporate governance, government and business heads, among others.

And the policy seems to complement the bank’s other corporate governance policies and practices: a classified board, a rigorous onboarding procedure, annual director performance assessments and thoughtful recruitment. Altogether, these policies ensure board continuity, offer a way to assess individual and board performance and create a pool of qualified prospects to fill regular vacancies.

Signature’s classified board staggers director turnover. Additionally, the board a few years ago extended the expiring term of its then-lead independent director by one year; that move means only two directors leave the board whenever they hit their term limits.

Shay says he didn’t want a completely new board that needed a new education every few years. “We wanted to keep it to a maximum of a turnover of two at a time,” he says.

To support the regularly occurring vacancies, Signature’s recruitment approach begins with identifying a class of potential directors well in advance of turnover and slowly whittling down the candidates based on interest, commitment and individual interviews with the nominating and governance committee members. And as a new outside director prepares to join the board, Signature puts them through “an almost exhausting onboarding process” to introduce them to various aspects of the bank and its business — which starts a month before the director’s first meeting.

But term limits, along with policies like mandatory retirement ages, can be a blunt corporate governance tool to manage refreshment. There are a number of other tools that boards could use to govern, improve and refresh their membership.

“I personally think term limits have no value at all,” says James J. McAlpin Jr., a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP.

He says that term limits may prematurely remove a productive director because they’re long tenured, and potentially replace them with someone who may be less engaged and constructive. He also dislikes when boards make exceptions for directors whose terms are expiring.

In lieu of term limits, he argues that banks should opt for board and peer evaluations that allow directors to reflect on their engagement and capacity to serve on the board. Regular evaluation can also help the nominating and governance committee create succession plans for committee chairs who are near the end of their board service.

Perhaps one reason why community banks are interested in term limits is because so few conduct assessments. Only 30% of respondents to Bank Director’s 2022 Governance Best Practices Survey, which published May 16, said they didn’t conduct performance assessments at any interval — many of those responses were at banks with less than $1 billion in assets. And 51% of respondents don’t perform peer evaluations and haven’t considered that exercise.

For McAlpin, a board that regularly evaluates itself — staffed by directors who are honest about their service capacity and the needs of the bank — doesn’t need bright-line rules around tenure to manage refreshment.

“It’s hard to articulate a reason why you need term limits in this day and age,” he says, “as opposed to just self-policing self-governance by the board.”

The Missing Piece in Community Bank M&A

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The community bank space is consolidating at a blistering pace, but buyers may be overlooking a key consideration when thinking about mergers and acquisitions. Prospective buyers should consider how other footprints complement growth opportunities against their own, lest they make critical and expensive mistakes. In this video, Kamal Mustafa, chairman of the Invictus Group, explains why bank buyers should assess a target’s footprint, and how to value the industries and lending opportunities within a new market.

  • Market Considerations and Assessments
  • Focusing on Industries, Not Loans
  • Target Valuations

Keeping the Digital Accelerant Going

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Digital transformation and strategy are further examined as part of Bank Director’s Inspired By Acquire or Be Acquired, launched today on BankDirector.com. Click here to access the content.

The coronavirus pandemic has been an accelerant for digital bank transformations. Banks must now keep that fire going.

“There’s never been a more important time for bank executives to think strategically,” says Cornerstone Advisors cofounder Steve Williams. The pandemic accelerated digital transformation plans by about two to three years, he estimates. It will soon be up to opportunistic bankers to continue that transformation in order to better position their institutions for the future and increase shareholder value during what could be a prolonged economic recovery.

The pandemic’s impact on physical spaces like branches underscored the importance of digital channels, capabilities and products. No longer was it acceptable for institutions to tack digital offerings onto existing branch initiatives and force customers to do a cross-channel dance: Open an account or loan in the branch but service it online, for instance.

Going forward, outperformers will be the banks that successfully overhaul or transform legacy tech, expenses, buildings, organizational structures and vendor contracts into next-generation capabilities. Williams says smarter banks are led by executive teams with a focused strategy, that leverage data strategically and actively manage vendor partnerships, rather than relying on their core processors. They also attract the talent and skills that the bank will need in the future, rather than just filling the vacancies that exist today.

The first place that banks direct their energies and attention to continue their digital momentum is the legacy branch network, says Tim Reimink, a managing director at Crowe. Branches are expensive to operate, have been closed for an extended period of time and were potentially underperforming prior to the pandemic. Banks also have the data to prove that customers will continue banking with them if locations are closed, and that many are now comfortable using digital channels.

“Every single location must be evaluated,” says Crowe Senior Manager Robert Reggiannini. Executives should weigh the market opportunity, penetration and existing wallet share of small businesses and consumer customers, as well as how the branch fits in with the rest of the network. Rationalizing the network frees up capital to redeploy into digital transformation or other areas of operation that need greater investment in the post-pandemic economy.

Certainly some banks have gotten that message. It wasn’t uncommon to see banks across the country announce double-digit rationalizing efforts, often announcing they would cut 20%. In December 2020 alone, banks opened 43 branches but permanently closed 240, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. For the year, they opened 982 locations and closed 3,099.

Reducing the branch network will necessitate changes in how bank staff interact with customers, Reggiannini adds. Banks should not assume tellers at a branch will find the same success in the digital chat environment, call center or at in-person meetings conducted outside of the branch.

He says banks should train staff in developing the skills needed to service a customer outside of a branch and consider how they will manage and measure staff for flexibility and productivity. “Engagement with customers is going to be critical going forward,” Reggiannini says.

The branch network, and the foot traffic and relationships they used to attract, have been under pressure from digital banks, often focused on consumer and retail relationships. But Williams warns that the pandemic underlined the vulnerability of commercial relationships. Numerous fintechs competed successfully against banks in issuing Paycheck Protection Program loans from the Small Business Administration, and a number of businesses are shifting more of their relationships to payment processors like Stripe and Square.

“Disruption will come to business banking – not as fast as retail banking but it’s coming,” Williams says. “If we lose the deposit and business relationship with commercial customers, will banks be able to keep their returns? We don’t think so.”

The Choice Facing Every Bank

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Has your executive team been approached by leaders of another bank interested in an acquisition? It likely means your bank is doing something right. But, now what?

Many CEOs’ visceral response to being asked to consider a deal is to say, “Thanks, but no thanks” and continue running the bank. While this may be the correct response, this overture is a chance for leadership to objectively revisit the bank’s strategic alternatives to determine the best option for its shareholders and other stakeholders.

Stay the Course
Boards must objectively identify where their bank is in its life cycle — be it turn-around, growth or stability — and what will be needed to successfully compete at the next stage. Ultimately, they must determine if the bank can drive more long-term shareholder value staying independent than it could with a partner. They must also weigh the risk of remaining independent against the potential reward.

Directors should prepare five-year projections, ideally with the help of a financial advisor, that assume the bank continues to operate independently. They should forecast growth and profitability that reasonably reflect current marketplace dynamics and company strategy, and are generally consistent with past performance. Consider opportunities to lower funding costs, consolidate or sell unprofitable branches, add lines of business, or achieve economies of scale through acquisitions or organic growth. However, be cognizant of market headwinds: low interest rate environment, slower projected loan growth, increasing cost of technology and cybersecurity, regulatory burden, competition, demographic trends, upcoming presidential election and so on. The board should also consider organizational issues such as succession planning — a major issue for many community banks. How do these factors impact the future performance of your institution? Will your bank be able to meet shareholder expectations?

Merge with Peer
Peer mergers have been a hot topic of late. The bank space has seen several high-profile transactions: the merger between BB&T Corp. and SunTrust Banks to form Truist Financial Corp.; Memphis, Tennessee-based First Horizon National Corp. and Lafayette, Louisiana-based IBERIABANK Corp.; Columbia, South Carolina-based South State Corp. and Winter Haven, Florida-based CenterState Bank Corp.; and McKinney, Texas-based Independent Bank Group and Dallas-based Texas Capital Bancshares.

The opportunity to double assets while achieving economies of scale can drive significant shareholder value. But these transactions can be tough to nail down because both parties must be willing to compromise on key negotiation topics. Which side selects the chairman? The CEO? How will the board be split? Where will the company be headquartered? What will be the name of the future bank?

Peer mergers can be risky propositions for banks, as cultures don’t always match and integration can take several years. However, the transaction can be a windfall for shareholders in the long run.

Sell
A decision to sell almost always generates the greatest immediate value for shareholders. Boards must ascertain if now is the right time, or if the bank can do better on its own.

Whether or not selling creates the highest long-term value for shareholders depends on several factors. One factor is the consideration mix, if any, between stock and cash. Cash gives shareholders the flexibility to invest and diversify the net proceeds as they see fit, but capital gains will be taxed immediately. Stock consideration is generally a tax-free exchange, when structured correctly, but it is paramount to select the right partner. Look for a bank with a strong management team and board, a proven track record of building shareholder value and a plan to continue to do so. That partner may not offer you the highest price today, but will most likely deliver a better return to shareholders in the long run, compared to other potential acquirers. Furthermore, a partner that is likely to sell in the near-term could provide a double-dip — a potential homerun for your shareholders.

It is crucial to consider what impact a sale would have on other stakeholders, like employees and the community. Prepare your bank to sell, well in advance of any conversations with potential acquirers. Avoid signing new IT contracts with material termination costs; it is an opportune time to sell when core processing contracts are nearing expiration. In addition, review existing employment agreements and consider establishing a severance plan to protect employees ahead of time.

Being approached by a potential acquirer gives your bank an opportunity to objectively reflect on its strategy and potentially adjust it. Even if your bank hasn’t been contacted by a potential acquirer, the board should still review the bank’s strategic alternatives annually, at a minimum, and determine the best path forward.

Four Interesting Insights from Two Very Interesting Bankers

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The greatest benefit of being a writer is that you get to talk with lots of interesting people. It’s a constant education. Particularly if you appreciate the opportunity and structure your conversations accordingly.

My style is to conduct broad interviews across a range of topics, whether all the topics are germane to the piece I’m working on at the moment or not. This has helped me construct a mental model of banking, but it also means that a lot of material is left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

With this in mind, I decided to revisit some of the conversations I’ve had with bankers over the past few months to share the most interesting insights.

Foremost among these is a series of conversations with Robert and Patrick Gaughen, the CEO and president, respectively, of Hingham Institution for Savings, a $2.6 billion bank based in the Boston metropolitan area.

Since the Gaughens gained control of Hingham in 1993, following a two-year proxy contest with its former managers, it has generated a total shareholder return of more than 5,400%, according to my math. That’s more than double the total return of other well-run banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and PNC Financial Services Group.

One thing that strikes you when talking with the Gaughens is the depth and sophistication of their banking philosophy. All bankers understand banking. But some understand it on a deeper level than others — that’s the Gaughens.

They approach the industry as investors, or capital allocators, instead of bankers. This seems to be a product of the fact that both Robert Gaughen and his father — Patrick’s grandfather — practiced law before becoming de facto bankers in order to protect investments they had made in banks.

This may seem like a vacuous nuance, but it isn’t. It’s always tempting to subordinate the process of capital allocation to operational processes. After all, if your operations aren’t profitable, you won’t have excess capital to allocate.

What true capital allocators appreciate, however, is that the distinction between capital allocation and operations is nebulous. Everything can be viewed through the prism of capital allocation — from how many employees you hire to which technologies you implement to whether you increase your dividend or repurchase stock.

In this respect, capital allocation is less of a mechanical process than it is a mindset, concentrating one’s attention on measuring the return on each incremental decision.

Another interesting insight that came up in our conversations is the importance of studying other industries. Not only the importance of doing so, I should say, but why it’s so important to do so.

The drive to constantly learn is something that many people preach, but few people practice. This is an element of leadership that can’t be overstated. It serves as the common denominator underlying the performance of the most successful CEOs in banking.

It’s well known that banking is an acutely competitive and commoditized industry, and that those characteristics compress profit margins. But there are two other forces that lead to a lack of differentiation as well.

As Patrick points out, high consultant reuse and an overbearing regulatory schema contribute to a high degree of homogeneity in terms of the way banks are run. The net result is that studying other banks can be less fruitful than one might think.

This isn’t to say that a mastery of banking isn’t critical — it is. But after accumulating a critical mass of knowledge about best practices within banking, the incremental return from intermittently studying other industries, it seems, will exceed the return of concentrating exclusively on banking.

The final point that both Gaughens stress relates to the importance of skin in the game, or executive and director ownership of stock. In their case, their immediate and extended family owns upwards of 40% of Hingham’s outstanding stock. This provides a powerful incentive to care not only about the return on their capital, but also the return of their capital.

Many companies talk about the mystical benefits of alignment between executives and shareholders, as well as having employees that act like owners. But there is simply no substitute for having actual skin in the game. It hones one’s appreciation for the virtues of extraordinary banking, from efficiency to risk management to disciplined growth.

None of this is to say that the Gaughens have everything figured out; they would be the first to admit they don’t. But their philosophy and approach to banking is not only unique, but also tried and true.

Using Succession Planning to Unlock Compensation Challenges

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compensation-9-16-19.pngSuccession planning could be the key solution boards can use to address their biggest compensation challenges.

Succession planning is one of the most critical tasks for a bank’s board of directors, right up there with attracting talented executives and compensating them. But many boards miss the opportunity of allowing succession planning to drive talent retention and compensation. Banks can address two major challenges with one well-crafted plan.

Ideally, succession planning is an ongoing discussion between executive management and board members. Proper planning encourages banks to assess their current talent base for various positions and identify opportunities or shortfalls.

It’s not a static one-and-done project either. Directors should be aware of the problems that succession planning attempts to solve: preparing future leaders, filling any talent voids, attracting and retaining key talent, strategically disbursing training funds and ultimately, improving shareholder value.

About a third of respondents in the Bank Director’s 2019 Compensation Survey reported that “succession planning for the CEO and/or executives” was one of the biggest challenges facing their banks. More popular challenges included “tying compensation to performance,” “managing compensation and benefit costs,” and “recruiting commercial lenders.”

But in our experience, these priorities are out of order. Developing a strategic succession planning process can actually drive solutions to the other three compensation challenges.

There are several approaches boards can use to formulate a successful succession plan. But they should start by assessing the critical roles in the bank, the projected departure dates of those individuals, and information and guidance about the skills needed for each position.

Boards should be mindful that the current leaders’ skill sets may be less relevant or evolve in the future. Susan Rogers, organizational change expert and president of People Pinnacle, said succession planning should consider what skills the role may require in the future, based on a company’s strategic direction and trends in the industry and market.

“The skills and experiences that got you where you are today likely won’t get you where you need to go in the future. We need to prepare future leaders for what’s ahead rather than what’s behind,” she said.

Once a board has identified potential successors, it can now design compensation plans that align their roles and training plans with incentives to remain with the organization. Nonqualified benefit plans, such as deferred compensation programs, can be effective tools for attracting and retaining key bank performers.

According to the American Bankers Association 2018 Compensation and Benefits Survey, 64% of respondents offered a nonqualified deferred compensation plan for top management. Their design flexibility means they can focus on both longer-term deferrals to provide retirement income or shorter-term deferrals for interim financial needs.

Plans with provisions that link benefits to the long-term success of the bank can help increase performance and shareholder value. Bank contributions can be at the board’s discretion or follow defined performance goals, and can either be a specific dollar amount or a percentage of an executive’s salary. Succession and training goals can also be incorporated into the plan’s award parameters.

Such plans can be very attractive to key employees, particularly the young and high performing. For example, assume that the bank contributes 8% of a $125,000 salary for a 37-year-old employee annually until age 65. At age 65, the participant could have an account balance equal to $1,470,000 (assuming a crediting rate equal to the bank’s return on assets (8%), with an annual payment of $130,000 per year for 15 years).

This same participant could also use a portion of the benefit to pay for college expenses for two children, paid for with in-service distributions from the nonqualified plan. Assume there are two children, ages three and seven, and the employee wants $25,000 a year to be distributed for each child for four years. These annual $25,000 distributions would be paid out when the employee was between ages 49 and 56. The remaining portion would be available for retirement and provide an annual benefit of $83,000 for 15 years, beginning at age 65.

Boards could use a plan like this in lieu of stock plans that have similar time horizons. This type of arrangement can be more enticing to younger leaders looking at shorter, more mid-term financial needs than a long-term incentive plan.

And many banks already have defined benefit-type supplemental retirement plans to recruit, retain, and reward key executives. These plans are very popular with executives who are 45 and older, because they provide specific monthly distributions at retirement age.

It is important that boards craft meaningful compensation plans that reward older and younger executives, especially when they are vital to the bank’s overall succession planning efforts and future success.

How Subchapter S Issues Could Snag a Sale

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acquisitions-5-2-19.pngNearly 2,000 banks in the U.S. have elected Subchapter S tax treatment as a way of enhancing shareholder value since 1997, the first year they were permitted to make the election. Consequently, many banks have more than 20 years of operating history as an S corporation.

However, this history is presenting increasingly frequent challenges during acquisition due diligence. Acquirers of S corporations are placing greater emphasis on due diligence to ensure that the target made a valid initial Subchapter S election and continuously maintained eligibility since the election. Common issues arising during due diligence typically fall into two categories:

  • Failure to maintain stock transfer and shareholder records with sufficient specificity to demonstrate continuous eligibility as an S corporation.
  • Failure by certain trust shareholders to timely make required Qualified Subchapter S Trust (QSST) or Electing Small Business Trust (ESBT) elections.

A target’s inability to affirmatively demonstrate its initial or continuing eligibility as an S corporation creates a risk for the acquirer. The target’s S election could be disregarded after the deal closes, subjecting the acquirer to corporate-level tax liability with respect to the target for all prior periods that are within the statute of limitations. This risk assessment may impact the purchase price or the willingness of the buyer to proceed with the transaction. In addition, the target could become exposed to corporate tax liability, depending on the extent of the compliance issues revealed during due diligence, unless remediated.

Accordingly, it is important for S corporation banks to ensure that their elections are continuously maintained and that they retain appropriate documentation to demonstrate compliance. An S corporation bank should retain all records associated with the initial election, including all shareholder consents and IRS election forms. S corporation banks should also maintain detailed stock transfer records to enable the substantiation of continuous shareholder eligibility.

Prior to registering a stock transfer to a trust, S corporation banks should request and retain copies of all governing trust instruments, as well as any required IRS elections.

It is also advisable to have the bank’s legal counsel review these trust instruments to confirm eligibility status and any required elections. Banks that are relying on the family aggregation rules to stay below the 100 shareholder limitation should also keep records supporting the family aggregation analysis.

While S corporation banks have realized significant economic benefits through the elimination of double taxation of corporate earnings, maintaining strong recordkeeping practices is a critical element in protecting and maximizing franchise value, especially during an acquisition. Any S corporation bank that is contemplating selling in the foreseeable future should consider conducting a preemptive review of its Subchapter S compliance and take any steps necessary to remediate adverse findings or secure missing documentation prior to exploring a sale.