"It was a very informative two days. It was also helpful to learn different ways to navigate through the tabs and fields in the Compass program."
 

We had nine bankers in our office last Thursday and Friday attending our first 2-day event, and what a success it was! We had a great group ranging from new clients, new users, and more established veterans, banks from $240 MM to $1.6 B in assets, men and women from diverse backgrounds, traveling in from near and far. The group was excited to share thoughts and ideas, and interested in ways we can help them enhance their understanding of the planning concepts and models.

We spent the first day at the Roundtable talking about topics of interest to them – here are a few highlights:

• Interest Rate Risk
• Managing Assumptions
• Internally building assumptions
• Peer analysis
• ALCO
• Rising Rates
• How to use Compass as a management tool

"I benefited from interacting with other users and the opportunity to ask questions with getting them answered."

We were very pleased to learn their Compass habits on the second day. Most everyone in the group is actively using the model for budgeting, reporting, and regulatory needs, with 1 or 2 commenting that they regularly reforecast (which they shared technique with the group), but more importantly, a few “non-budgeters” or “non-IRR” users saw that Compass could fulfill those gaps and truly be used as in all-in-one tool.

A few takeaways on day 2:

• Several of the attendees are directly responsible for assumption analyses and database maintenance so they already have a good handle of their own internal studies for decay/prepayments
• 2 clients have signed with vendors for processing CECL
• 1 bank solely uses Compass as their management tool with a 4 QTR rolling budget
• For attendance at this two-day event, Plansmith issued each a free year of StrategyGPS, it created quite the excitement and buzz around the room
• Most all want to better at troubleshooting their IRR results and managing pricing assumptions
• Some want help with getting “Compass buy-in” from upper management, so they are allowed to do more with it (i.e. annual budgets still created in excel, “it makes our process miserable”)
• Like most of our other groups, they too are always thirsty for more information but find that emails and channels are becoming more and more blocked so they aren’t even aware of some of our educational content that we have out there for them

"It was a great event, learned a lot of things. I would like to come again."

A giant THANK YOU to all who helped out – whether in person, in our prep work, or who supported us with kind words and good wishes. We know that these events have been and will continue to be successful not because of our efforts alone, but because of the strength of the entire team.

If you have thoughts or suggestions for us to improve, please don’t hesitate to share them with us.