Another great year has gone by, the stock market notwithstanding. With the number of banks and credit unions continuing to shrink, the cream is rising to the top. The quality of the remaining institutions is getting better.
Regulatory compliance costs are skyrocketing!
The focus of safety and soundness examinations continues to move towards asset/liability management and ensuring financial institutions are complying with the guidance issued in the last several years.
So why do we keep hearing about “surge” deposits and how important it is to know if you’re holding any? Well, it might be because in the past 10 years, CD balances in FDIC insured institutions have fallen by $880 Billion; yes, that’s Billion with a capital “B.” And while that may be the bad news, the good news is that over the same time period, non-maturity deposits (DDAs, NOWs, Savings, and MMDAs) have grown by $5.9 Trillion (with a capital “T”).
The purchase of an asset liability management (ALM) system presents a problem to many bankers. Often the process begins with the creation of a checklist of features and functions then progresses to comparing vendors. The vendor with the highest "score" wins. While this may be a good start, there are dimensions to the problem that this ignores, specifically the quality and significance of the features identified.
A: Its failures.
Knowing and understanding your bank's risk position is important. Regulators expect you to keep a close eye on your IRR exposure and be ready for a rising rate environment.
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.
In its Semiannual Risk Perspective, the OCC said strategic risk remains high as banks consider business model changes and face revenue challenges.
It's tough out there for banks. With so much competition from other financial institutions and new technologies, not to mention increased government regulation, it's no wonder some bankers feel overwhelmed. One of the hot topics of regulation at the moment is interest rate risk, and examiners want to know how the bank is poised to handle it. What does this come down to? It comes down to a process for handling interest rate risk, or an Interest Rate Risk Management Program.