Plansmith Blog

Five Pillars of a Productive Community Bank Planning Process

Posted by Craig Hartman on 8/25/15 2:30 PM

Plansmith has been building financial planning software for community banks for over 45 years. More than just coding keystrokes and calculations, though, we understand the real process of planning and build systems that seamlessly integrate into that process.

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Community Bank Planning is a Collaborative Activity, Part 2

Posted by Craig Hartman on 7/30/15 3:00 PM

In the last post, we discussed the responsibilities and planning software opportunities of the Asset Liability Committee (ALCO), Investments/Funds Management, and the CFO. This post will address the role of the Community Bank's Branch/Department Managers, the Marketing Department, and the CEO/The Board.

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Community Bank Planning is a Collaborative Activity

Posted by Craig Hartman on 7/13/15 3:30 PM

Who in your community bank should be using planning specialty software? Accounting, the Board, the ALCO? You might be surprised as to how many various areas/departments and their respective managers should actively use and benefit from an automated planning system.

What are the various functional areas and departments that should be actively involved in planning at your community bank?

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Bank IRR: Backtesting…Necessary Evil or Just Evil?

Posted by Dave Wicklund on 4/16/15 12:00 PM

So if you’re reading this, my second ever blog post, you’ve probably already seen the first one entitled "Independent Review, Model Validation, and Backtesting: Same Thing, Only Different." In that piece, we looked at the interrelationship of these three items and brought up a few questions on backtesting. Specifically, we questioned who should do it, how often should it be done, what period should be covered, do you need to backtest model results and assumptions, and why even bother if market rates really aren’t changing.

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Independent Review, Model Validation, and Backtesting for Community Banks

Posted by Dave Wicklund on 3/16/15 2:30 PM

In our ever increasing efforts to educate and inform, our marketing department here at team Plansmith has been on me to contribute to our Blog. Quite frankly, I’m not really a "blog" guy, but for those of you that know me, I’m not short on opinions either. So, given that I sit here stuck on a plane for a few hours, this seems like a good time to take a shot at it.

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Community Bankers, There's Room For Improvement

Posted by Bill Smith on 3/2/15 5:30 PM
Most community bank and credit union boards and executives spend a lot of time looking at past performance data. But many only look at projected data once a year at budget time.

Seems backwards to me. As George Bush (the older one) said, "The past is over". The future is unlimited. We can do nothing to change what has happened, but we can do anything to change the future.

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Community Bankers: The Most Popular Posts of 2014

Posted by Danielle Slowey on 1/5/15 1:30 PM

Happy one year anniversary to Sparks from the Anvil! There has been a great response to the blog, thanks to all of you.

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The Future Risk in Community Banking

Posted by Craig Hartman on 12/8/14 10:30 AM

Since the introduction of the venerable GAP analysis in the mid-1970s, risk management has continued to evolve. It has moved from the basic mismatch of rate sensitive assets and liabilities to more sophisticated techniques – such as prepayment modeling, rate change betas on non-maturing deposits, and rate shocking with parallel rate shifts and non-parallel rate shifts. Then mark-to-market analysis of the balance sheet and the impact on equity was brought in with the attendant benchmarks. These are all interesting measurements of the company’s risk at a point in time. It’s like glancing at your car’s dashboard.

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Community Bankers: Year-End is Almost Here!

Posted by Sherri Scott on 12/1/14 10:00 AM

Whether your year-end is calendar or fiscal, there are a few things you can do to make the future-you happy. Examiners and auditors thoroughly enjoy marking off their-checklist of items to review and criticize. Most times the request letters ask for the same documents year-after year. Create an exam folder complete with instructions for yourself for the following year.

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Community Banks, Budget Your Time!

Posted by Sherri Scott on 11/17/14 5:30 PM

Interest rate risk, call reports, budget, ALCO, board meetings, re-doing the budget, exams, audits, holiday parties, vacation schedules…I’m already exhausted. My suggestion, budget your time! I can’t tell you how many times I hear clients say they had to postpone scheduled days off to complete their workload. This is the perfect time to plan what you can before year-end.

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