Plansmith Blog

Budget Reforecasting for Financial Institutions

Posted by Roxanne Nikirk on 10/17/17 3:08 PM
Your budgets are finalized. Year end is over. Now what?

Our budgeting process gives us an idea of where we think we are headed in the next year. Many times, what we think will happen, is not what happens in reality. After all, if we all had a crystal ball at our disposal, you would not be reading this blog right now (I know I would not be writing it!).

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The Community Bank Strategic Planning Experiment: Using Your Model To Prepare for Rising Interest Rates

Posted by Sue West on 5/10/17 10:00 AM
Q: What makes an experiment successful?

A: Its failures.

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Focus on Customers Not Commodities

Posted by Jim Fugitte on 2/15/17 8:03 AM

With so many different community banks offering so many different products, banks often ask us how they can better compete on product offerings. If a bank is offering two checking accounts with no monthly fee, three with rewards, and one with insurance, what should a competitive bank offer in response?

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Answered: Bankers' 5 Most Painful Questions about Backtesting

Posted by Dave Wicklund on 1/23/17 8:18 AM

Backtesting can be a painful topic for bankers. In this post, I'll answer the top 5 most common questions I hear about backtesting. I'll reference my first post, Independent Review, Model Validation, and Backtesting: Same Thing, Only Different, so you might want to revisit it before reading on. In that blog, we looked at the interrelationship of these three items and brought up a few questions on backtesting.

Specifically, we questioned 5 things: 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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5 Tools Everyone In The Banking Industry Should Be Using

Posted by Megan Plis on 11/16/16 11:32 AM

You see some people using them, and they're working great. Why isn't everybody already on board? Maybe the tools are brand new. Perhaps they're too expensive. Who knows, they might be really exclusive.

Except, most of the time, they're not. So, what keeps people from getting their hands on the best time-saving tools in the banking industry?

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FinTech & The Generational Melting Pot Effect

Posted by Megan Plis on 8/31/16 10:05 AM

There is a lot of buzz surrounding millennials and their unique psychographics and behaviors, especially with regard to buying habits. But it's not just millennials that are exhibiting fascinating (and at times, frustrating) preferences. As Jim Perry of Market Insights and #BANKSOCIAL discusses in his article, Modern Demographic Cohorts, Defined By Expectations, Want The Same Things From FIs, other generations, including baby boomers, are stepping outside of their perceived demographic[s] and assimilating with attitudes, beliefs and even behaviors of diverse age groups.

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Community Banks: Fun with Funds Transfer Pricing, Part II

Posted by Tom Parsons on 3/23/16 12:00 PM

In the previous post we explored the concept of funds transfer pricing (FTP), but only on the surface level. Now for the good stuff: how should the FTP rate be assigned? Well, in a number of ways from the simple to the complex. Like a lot of things in life, simple means fast, easy, less data, good enough; whereas complex requires lots of patience and data for a little more accuracy.

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How to Get Someone to Do What You Want

Posted by Jim Groark on 2/17/16 10:30 AM

One of the worst ways to get someone to do something you want is to tell them what to do. Most parents learn that lesson the hard way. The better way to incent certain behaviors is to have the other person see the benefit of exhibiting the desired behavior.

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Your Email is Putting Your Bank at Risk

Posted by Christopher Hartman on 2/3/16 1:00 PM

***Your Domain name can be used to SPOOF emails to anyone.***

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CEOs: 3 Important Thoughts on FinTech and Community Banking for 2016

Posted by Tom Parsons on 1/19/16 12:30 PM

As a CEO or CFO of a community bank, you are well aware that mega banking institutions are investing heavily in innovative technologies designed to take customers away from you. Having serviced the industry for over 25 years, I've seen many changes, but none as profound as outlined in two recent articles highlighting the impact of FinTech.

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