Happy one year anniversary to Sparks from the Anvil! There has been a great response to the blog, thanks to all of you.
2014 has been a busy year at Plansmith! We have made some great updates to our products, added some wonderful clients to the Plansmith family, and have been busy keeping up-to-date with the latest regulations and changes in the banking world.
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.
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.
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.
In part one of this series, we discussed establishing your goals and developing several alternatives or contingency funding plans. Next, we will discuss the remaining 3 rules.
"May you live in interesting times." This ancient Chinese proverb continues to describe the nature of banking. The banking community is going through the most challenging period since the Great Depression. Not only is the economy unsure, but flat interest rates, coupled with new regulation and increased consolidation, have caused massive structural changes within the financial industry. In brief, the task of management has become more difficult. It has changed from a maintenance task to one of survival. Today’s banker must be more sensitive to marketing, pricing, resource allocation, and productivity than at any time in the past. He/she must sharpen their business expertise, marketing skills, investment sense, and develop a tougher attitude toward expense control. To accompany all this, you must have the appropriate informational tools that allow you to assimilate and evaluate the impact of possible changes to the institution’s current and future income.
Financial institutions are not like other businesses. After all how many other businesses get a daily statement of condition? In what other business is the balance sheet also the product list? It must be remembered that a financial institution’s directors typically come from other industries. For these reasons, it is management’s responsibility to translate the business model, key operating ratios and banking language into terms familiar to directors to insure meaningful dialog.
Interestingly, the response I usually hear from small businesses (outside of the banking industry) is that they do have a strong, more formal handle on their day to day cash needs. They keep a check register (albeit mostly electronically, for example in QuickBooks). They know how much cash they need to fund their regular business needs and they monitor their cash flow in detail. They know which customers they need to collect from up-front, and which ones are slow to pay. They have concrete back-up plans if cash runs tight – savings, lines of credit, which bills they can delay paying versus which payments are critical to be paid on time. They know where they’ve been and where they’re trending - positive cash flow is critical to staying in business, so cash flow is always top of mind. Otherwise they’re out of business (and hence not part of my survey.)
