Articles
Take Financial Wellness Beyond “Nice to Have” Features
Digital estate planning can build a deeper one-stop financial relationship with your FI By James Mason The last fintech wave was decidedly driven, like today’s burst of interest in AI, by the follow-on effects of the new digital age that has altered the entire marketplace in the past 20 years. We saw it hit retail…
Read MoreHow to Win More SMB Business in This Market
By Gregg Early According to a recent Jack Henry article, the top 25 banks in the US account for 84% of primary banking relationships with SMBs. And community and regional FIs’ share of primary SMB banking relationships are declining due to megabanks and digital banks expanding their market share – from 28% in 2018 to…
Read MoreOD/NSF Fees: The False Safety Net of Doing Nothing
By Mike Branton Given the proposed CFPB rules that are going into effect regarding OD/NSF fees, it’s the right time to find out how banks and credit unions are dealing and planning to deal with this dominant source of non-interest income being increasingly scrutinized (yep, it’s classified as a “junk fee”) and regulated to generate…
Read MoreYour Checking Products Must Address SMB Customers’ CyberSecurity Concerns
By Dave DeFazio The statistics are sobering about the cyber challenges and data theft realities of being small and medium businesses (SMB) today. According to Infosecurity Magazine: Over three-quarters of cyber incidents impacted small businesses in 2023. Nearly half of all malware targeting SMBs last year focused on data theft. Researchers observed a rise…
Read MoreResearch Part 4: Opportunities from Reinventing Business Checking Accounts
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final part in our series exploring market research we commissioned with financial services firm Cornerstone Advisors to get a state of market view through the eyes of SMB leaders across the country. Our main goal was to understand their challenges now and how community financial institutions could…
Read MoreThe Great Deposit Race: Optimizing the “Less is More Strategy”
Choosing a proactive strategy to prune unproductive accounts may seem radical By Gregg Early It may seem counterintuitive to think that the best way to build primacy, grow deposits organically, and generate more non-interest income is to focus on determining which accounts aren’t financially productive and how to fix that relationship with your FI. Community…
Read MoreCommunity FI Leaders’ Survey Delivers Revealing Deposit Expectations for 2024
By Mike Branton When it comes to finding out what community banks and credit unions are planning for the coming year related to deposit performance the best way is to ask them directly. There’s no doubt that there’s plenty of data regularly published by third parties about community FIs and the broader banking industry regarding…
Read MoreResearch Part 3: SMB Banking Relationship Paradoxes Are Opportunities for Community FIs
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a monthly series exploring market research we commissioned with financial services firm Cornerstone Advisors to get a state of market view through the eyes of SMB leaders across the country. Our main goal was to understand their challenges now and how community financial institutions could best compete…
Read MoreResearch Part 2: Reinventing a Community FI Strategy to Regain SMB Market Share
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a monthly series exploring market research we commissioned with financial services firm Cornerstone Advisors to get a state of market view through the eyes of SMB leaders across the country. Our main goal was to understand their challenges now and how community financial institutions could best compete…
Read MoreRecording: Community Bankers Survey on the 3 Ds: Deposits, Differentiation, and Decisions
Download Presentation (PDF) We decided that if we want to know how bankers are planning for deposit growth next year, we weren’t going to rely on statistics and projections – we were going straight to the source. We asked hundreds of community bank and credit union leaders to tell us what they were planning for…
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