Category: Articles

Articles

Plug and Play: Four Ways to Level Up Your Mobile Banking App

For a growing share of bank customers—especially millennials and their successors, Generation Z, mobile banking is where they will engage with their customers most frequently. According to Federal Reserve figures, 43 percent of bank customers use mobile banking, including 67 percent of millennials. According to a TD Bank survey, mobile is the fastest-growing channel for bank customers. Today, bank mobile apps offer a great deal … Continue reading Plug and Play: Four Ways to Level Up Your Mobile Banking App

Evan Sparks
Articles, Profiles

Nine Young Bankers Who Changed America

Early in 2016, while tracing the history of U.S. savings banks for an article I was writing on their bicentennial, I was intrigued by the stories of two of the founders of the savings bank movement: Philadelphian Condy Raguet and Bostonian James Savage. Both were 32 when, in 1816, they founded the first American savings banks in their respective hometowns. In addition to their contributions … Continue reading Nine Young Bankers Who Changed America

Evan Sparks
Articles

Beyond the Cross-Sell: Deepening Relationship Banking

Twenty-seven years ago, Micah Bartlett was a first-time bank teller at a small community bank in central Illinois. A few months in, the bank CEO gathered the staff to discuss the topic of the day: cross-selling. “Going forward, we were all going to be about cross-selling,” he remembers. The idea never had a chance. “I never changed my habits at all, and most of my … Continue reading Beyond the Cross-Sell: Deepening Relationship Banking

Evan Sparks
Articles

Regulatory Compliance? Elementary

Jeopardy! viewers in 2011 witnessed a first in game show history: a computer not only competed in the show, but wiped the floor with its opponents. Watson, a cognitive computer system, left Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter—previously Jeopardy!’s top champions—in its dust over a three-round matchup. IBM built Watson specifically to compete in a trivia show, but the potential applications proved highly commercial. Watson is … Continue reading Regulatory Compliance? Elementary

Evan Sparks
Articles

Blue-Collar Banking

A cool November day in 1816 Philadelphia found Condy Raguet strolling down Chestnut Street, reflecting on ideas he had just read about the “friendly societies” and mutually owned savings banks popping up all over Great Britain to promote thrift among the poor.

A handsome, well-traveled, well-read 32-year-old merchant, Raguet bumped into a few friends and asked if they had heard of the concept. “Would you unite with me,” he asked, “to establish one?” The friends—one of them a scion of Philadelphia’s wealthy Biddle family—had indeed heard of the savings-bank concept and wanted to cooperate with Raguet. They decided to call their new institution the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society. Continue reading “Blue-Collar Banking”

Evan Sparks
Articles

Compliance Issues to Watch in 2017

The regulatory front offers the possibility for meaningful regulatory relief, but the timetable for obtaining that relief is uncertain. Although ABA staff are working now with members to identify regulatory changes that will encourage economic growth, we may not see results immediately, says ABA SVP Virginia O’Neill, who leads the association’s Center for Regulatory Compliance.

This is because the top officials of the independent banking agencies have terms that do not expire with the inauguration of a new president. Continue reading “Compliance Issues to Watch in 2017”

Evan Sparks
Articles

Pillar of Her Community

Dorothy Savarese tells a story about a humbling discovery she made shortly after moving to Cape Cod and how it reflects the heart of community banking.

She already had 16 years of experience in economic development and at a large regional bank in the Midwest. She had taught credit analysis on a national basis. So when she arrived on the Cape and started work as a commercial lender at the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, “I looked at the credits here and the way they had been written up in the past, and they certainly didn’t meet my standards of documentation or credit underwriting,” she says—noting that they were short on financial analysis and long on character analysis.

“One of the things they had used long before I arrived to judge the creditworthiness of a customer was how neat their woodpile was,” she says. “If they did not have a neat woodpile, they would not make a loan to that customer.”

Continue reading “Pillar of Her Community”

Evan Sparks
Articles

Capturing Mobile Banking ROI for Community Banks

Offering mobile banking is often described as the “price of admission” or “table stakes” for retail banking today. Surveys bear that out—according to a recent survey by the Federal Reserve and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, 95 percent of community banks offer mobile banking or will do so in the near future.

But while mobile banking is becoming universal, it can still cause heartburn for bankers uncertain about the return on investment. How can bankers quantify the efficiencies, savings, sales and ultimately profits that they hope mobile will bring? Continue reading “Capturing Mobile Banking ROI for Community Banks”

Evan Sparks
Articles

How Banks Drive Growth in American Manufacturing

Manufacturing is having a moment. From custom 3-D printed cars to bandages that can provide health readings to photonics technology that is making Hollywood sci-fi fantasies real, manufacturers are deploying cutting-edge technology to improve their processes, offer better products and boost the productivity of the American economy. This revolution in manufacturing, which has emerged as the industry has recovered a million jobs post-recession and charged … Continue reading How Banks Drive Growth in American Manufacturing

Evan Sparks
Articles

How Bank Startups Build Leaders

The year is only half past, but 2016 is well on its way to joining 2011, 2012 and 2014 in a dubious distinction: a year that zero new U.S. banks were chartered. As consolidation of existing banks continues, many have observed that the lack of new banks reflects burdensome regulatory compliance, an inhospitable interest rate environment, excessive capital requirements, an insufficiently robust economy—or some mixture of all of these.

In his classic 1946 book Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt writes that economics “is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.” And thus, while the drought of de novo banks will ripple through the American economy, it will have subtle, significant and virtually unexplored long-run effects on the next generation of bank leadership. Continue reading “How Bank Startups Build Leaders”

Evan Sparks