US Banker back issues from July 2009:
It's Time to Move Past The Finger-Pointing; Community bankers have long played the us-against-them card, with mixed results, but their efforts have paid off lately.(Commentary)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Alan Kline, Editor-in-Chief The FDIC's plan to assess deposit premiums based on a bank's assets, rather than its deposits, is a testament to the community-banking lobby's growing influence in Washington. In Congressional testimony, meetings with regulators, ...
Raking in the Fee Income; Despite recession, banks' income from insurance activity increased in 2008. Citi continues to dominate, but Wells and BofA - thanks to big acquisitions - are catching up.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Alan Kline Among bank holding companies, Citigroup Inc. remains the industry leader in generating insurance revenue, but rivals Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp. are closing the gap. According to data compiled by Michael White Associates of Radnor, ...
Getting in the Game; Adding Web-based interactive puzzles and entertainment to the marketing mix adds to brand awareness. The real contest for banks is turning gamers into customers.(Marketing)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Byline: Anthony Malakian To help promote its new contactless payment card, Barclays plc produced a video game aimed at young consumers-the demographic the bank sees as most likely to use the card. The player has 20 seconds to aid a swimmer through a maze of ...
AD BEAT: New Ally, Big Splash; The former GMAC Bank bets on a name change and an image overhaul to reverse its fortunes.(Marketing)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Byline: Anthony Malakian Despite its ties to the beleaguered General Motors and its own capital concerns, GMAC Bank had little trouble attracting deposits after it established a bank holding company in December. Deposits surged 16 percent in the first quarter, to $22.5 billion. ...
Match Game; Banks need money, and private equity's got lots of it - $1 trillion by some estimates. It seems like a natural marriage and there have been some high-profile pairings, yet many of the industry's heaviest hitters are still just looking, held up by concerns about pricing, control and the uncertain economy.(Cover Story)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Byline: John Engen The story behind the year's biggest bank failure was, in many ways, typical of the financial crisis. BankUnited Financial, Florida's largest homegrown banking company, was knee-deep in bad housing loans. It had tried several times to raise capital, and ...
The Dollars and Sense of Going Mobile; With budgets shrinking and customer habits shifting, bankers are focusing less on the buzz and more on the bottom line of mobile-banking services.(Mobile Banking)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Glen Fest Banks that latched onto mobile banking a few years ago were more interested in first-mover advantage than profitability. But the squeeze on IT budgets, along with the growing popularity of banking services on smart phones, is shifting bankers' ...
Keeping a Tight Schedule; Whether adopted in-house or on a "cloud," workforce optimization technology is helping H.R. departments reduce employee overhead - without sacrificing service.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Steve Garmhausen Rauly Butler, the retail banking manager at Mechanics Bank in Richmond, Calif., calls the bank's recent investment in sophisticated scheduling technology a "no-brainer." The technology should save the $2.8 billion-asset Mechanics $865,000 a ...
Your Ad Here, Free; Colorado's FirstBank, a creative advertiser in its own right, plans co-promotional marketing services, on the house, to its beleaguered business clients.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Anthony Malakian It's hard to succeed in business without marketing, but try telling that to small-business owners in a recession. When struggling to find buyers for their goods and services, many shop owners are thinking more about making payroll than, say, investing in ...
Such Language! Enforcement orders can be harsh. A new advocacy group - Community Bankers Revolt - says they don't have to be.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Robert Barba Can saving face help save a struggling bank? Chuck Frost, the president and chief executive officer of First State Bank in Winchester, Ill., believes it can. His $36.3 million-asset bank is negotiating the terms of a cease-and-desist order with regulators, ...
A Matter of Maturity; CRE loans held in portfolios are more at risk than commercial mortgage-backed securities. But banks have one advantage over servicers when it comes to workouts: they know their customers.(commercial real estate mortgages)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Heather Landy The shorter the maturity, the smaller the risk - that's supposedly the rule of thumb in lending. But credit crunches have a way of proving exceptions to such rules, and if Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. analyst Richard Parkus is right, banks ...
The Case for Building a Social Media Strategy.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Stessa Cohen, Gartner Inc. Social networking Web sites will affect banks more than you think. Social banking, an emerging banking distribution model, has the potential to displace banks from the center of customers' financial services relationships. The growth of social ...
STUDENT LENDING: A Whole New World; Small lenders are trying to convince lawmakers that they are crucial to the student-aid industry. It's an uphill battle.(Front and Center)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Anthony Malakian Bank of North Dakota makes about 70 percent of the student loans in its home state, but if the Obama Administration has its way, the $3.5 billion-asset bank would be out of the origination business by this time next year. The bank is not ...
Electronic Lending Could Help Avert Another Crisis.(OpEd)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Andrew Dubinsky, Encomia LP Since Lehman Brothers collapsed last year it has become painfully obvious that regulators are ill equipped to view institutional loan portfolios in a way that will help them adequately monitor the global financial system. Because of Lehman's ...
Risk Management: Miles to Go; The G30 recommendations are a start, but, as in Canada, meaningful guidance must come from regulators.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Joseph Rosta With all the attention in Washington being given to executive compensation, the credit cardholders' bill of rights, student loans, and the concept of a single banking regulator, the issue of risk management reform seems firmly stuck on the political back ...
Top 50 Bank Holding Companies Ranked by Total Insurance Income.(Snapshot: The Insurance All-Stars)(Company rankings)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Rank 2008 Rank 2007 Income Total Insurance ($000s) Bank Holding Company Name City State 1 1 $3,221,000 Citigroup Inc. New York NY 2 2 $1,830,000 Wells Fargo & Co. San Francisco CA 3 5 $1,822,499 Bank of America Corp. Charlotte NC 4 4 $928,449 ...
Top 25 Bank Holding Companies Ranked by Total Brokerage Income in 2008.(Brief article)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Insurance Brokerage Fee Income 2008 Insurance Brokerage Fee Income 2007 % Growth Name of Depository State Insurance Brokerage Fee Income as % of Noninterest Income 1 $1,595,000 $1,272,000 25.39% Wells Fargo & Co. CA 9.85% 2 $1,207,000 $2,016,000 -40.13% Citigroup Inc ....
Holding Companies at which Insurance Income Made up the Highest Percentage of Noninterest Income in 2008.(Snapshot: The Insurance All-Stars)(Brief article)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Rank % of Non-Interest Income Bank Holding Company Name City State 1 323.72% Citigroup Inc. New York NY 2 235.06% Alliance Bankshares Corporation Chantilly VA 3 68.51% 473 Broadway Holding Corporation Saratoga Springs NY 4 62.52% Central ...
DEPOSIT RATE CAPS: Bidder Medicine; The FDIC is restricting weak banks from paying up for deposits, but the lower funding costs should help them stay competitive.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Glen Fest While its house was burning down, BankUnited of Coral Gables, Fla., was on a deposit-gathering spree. Florida's largest lender had been under the gun to reverse its negative Tier 1 capital ratio since being slapped with cease-and-desist order in ...
FreshInk.(Front and Center)(Brief article)
Jul 01, 2009 ... 1. OceanFirst Financial Corp. of Toms River, N.J., is buying Central Jersey Bancorp, which has about $577 million of assets, in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $70 million. 2. First Financial Bancorp in Cincinnati will pay about $12 million to acquire 17 branches from Peoples ...
Assuming an Old Remedy.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Glen Fest Loan modifications, short sales, and principal reductions have been godsends for some homeowners and lenders, but collectively have failed to pull the housing market out of a ditch. Both RealtyTrac and the Mortgage Bankers Association report a surge in ...
Noted and Noteworthy.(Brief article)
Jul 01, 2009 ... Community bankers sure are getting a lot of love in Washington lately. Just days after the FDIC's board of directors voted in late May to establish an advisory committee on community banking, legislation was introduced in the House that would create an assistant secretary for community ...
FASB Waves Goodbye to "Qs"; Bankers are worried about regulatory guidance on the accounting shift; some will have to add to reserves as toxic assets land on the balance sheet.(Financial Accounting Standards Board)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Joseph Rosta Following a year of pondering, listening, and reviewing, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided to eliminate the concept of qualified special purpose entities, commonly known as "Q's." FASB has been troubled by the existence of Q's for some ...
Up in the Clouds; Banks are beginning to experiment with cloud computing, to run enterprise applications, like CRM databases, more efficiently. But will the technology appeal to banks that want in-house control?(Fast Forward)
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Karen Epper Hoffman More banking information tech departments may be looking at a cloudy future - and that's not a bad thing. So-called "cloud computing," a technology that lets companies run key applications as-needed on a collection of low-cost servers as ...
Cloud Computing 101.
Jul 01, 2009; ... Byline: Karen Epper Hoffman Cloud computing is an architecture where applications and computations are run over an easily scalable and highly virtualized set of low-cost servers. It is typically run as a service over Internet technologies. Cloud computing is ...