Plansmith Blog

Establishing and maintaining a sound interest rate risk (IRR) management program is crucial to ensure proper balance sheet structure and comply with Regulatory expectations. During my 20+ years as a senior FDIC examiner, I routinely saw organizations experiencing issues with their ALM/IRR practices, ranging from loose misunderstandings of the guidance to critical errors that put the health of the organization at risk. Unfortunately, in my current advisory role, all too often, I see the same issues.

Risk is inevitable in banking; in fact, it’s what makes banking profitable. The question is, how much risk is acceptable? Recognizing that existing techniques of measurement were sometimes misleading and arbitrary, Plansmith developed a simple calculation called "Margin Risk Tolerance" that defines how much risk each bank can take. Despite the wealth of banking information Plansmith has at hand, we believe risk relates to the individual bank, and cannot be measured to any peer standard or magic number.

Margin risk tolerance calculates the minimum net interest income and net interest margin necessary to maintain continuing operations. Minimum margin consists of two basic components: 1) earnings needed to maintain an acceptable capital ratio and pay dividends, and 2) earnings needed for overhead.

"Which measurements would you put highest priority on in 2024?"

I’d say that Net Interest Margin (NIM) changes and Economic Value of Equity (EVE) should continue to be the primary focus of IRR management in 2024. Gap calculations rarely give the full picture (focused on timing of reprice, and not magnitude), and Duration measurements can be difficult to understand. Given the extreme rate increases in the past two years and the bank failures in 2023, all financial institution managers and directors should have a clear understanding of how future market rate changes could impact both shorter-term earnings (aka the NIM in the next one and two years) and longer-term capital values (aka the EVE).

The Fed has officially raised rates, with the intention of continuing to do so several more times this year. What does that mean for your financial institution, and how will it affect your Budgeting and ALM/IRR programs in 2022? Let’s focus on a few areas of concern, specifically Financial Reporting, Strategic Decision Making, and Board/ALCO oversight.

Given the current low-rate environment, I’ve again been getting some questions on “negative rates” and the impact they would have on financial institutions, and more specifically interest rate risk modeling. We’ve all heard about negative rates in Japan and parts of Europe, so it would seem reasonable to wonder about the impact that negative rates could have here in the U.S.

Given the historic low U.S Treasury rate environment and the recent 150 basis point near-immediate drop in rates, we’re expecting an increased regulatory focus on interest rate risk (IRR) and liquidity management.

It’s no doubt that financial institutions will see pressure to not only reforecast their 2020 budgets, but also to run future IRR shocks and more custom “what-if” scenarios as part of their regular IRR modeling program. Liquidity management and stressed-scenario cash flow modeling are also more important now than ever.

For the past ten years or so, surge deposits have been a material issue in asset/liability management. At the time of, and following the 2007-2009 Great Recession, the banking industry saw a substantial influx of deposits as real estate and equity investors liquidated positions and sought safe places to store their money and ride out the storm. The impact of this flight to safety was compounded by Government sponsored initiatives such as the Transaction Account Guarantee (TAG) Program and increases in Federal deposit insurance levels.

As a result, banks experienced significant deposit growth, and while these surge deposits would have normally been seen as a good thing, the near evaporation of loan demand left many banks with far more deposit dollars than they could effectively put to use. In turn, market liquidity levels skyrocketed, but margins were compressed. For the purpose of this article, we’ll refer to these funds moving from real estate, equities, or any other investments into the banking system as Type I Surge Deposits.

I know my numbers, but how do I communicate them to others within my organization?

Everyone relates to numbers, no matter who you're talking to, but not everyone reads them in the same way. So, how do you make the most out of your conversations with everyone who needs to relate to the same numbers?

As we move into a new year, you may still be working on a few of those items you didn’t quite get to in 2019. And for a lot of our clients, one of those items is often backtesting. Given all the confusion surrounding backtesting, it can be pretty easy to keep pushing it to the bottom of the “to-do” list.

So, we thought it might be a good idea to dust off a blog I wrote back in 2015 to jump start your 2020 so you can get one more thing crossed off your list. In that blog, we looked at a few of the most common questions we get on backtesting. Specifically, we discussed who should do it; how often it should be done; what period should be covered; and if you need to backtest just model results, or also key model assumptions.

Knowing and understanding your organization'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.