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As you certainly must know – unless you are returning from a long, wireless sabbatical spent in a cloister of monks sworn to silence, the iPhone recently celebrated a “big” birthday.  The device that changed most everything about banking, shopping, driving and more is 10 years old. 

To say that some financial institutions (FIs) have an unhealthy obsession with the Durbin Amendment is not a stretch.  These FIs have been watching and waiting hopefully at a brief window of (probably unrealistic) hope that the new administration would repeal the amendment. The reality for all FIs, however, is that aside from some regulatory relief around the edges, there’s little reason to expect meaningful action on the regulatory front until after the 2018 mid-term elections.

For anyone working at a company with a calendar-based fiscal year, the August dog days of summer also mean the advent of the annual planning cycle. Odds are that department heads are being asked to “do more with less,” or at least to increase output at a faster rate than costs. As anyone with budget responsibility is well aware, it’s no easy task to fund reasonable pay increases for valued employees let alone accommodate growth in other expense areas.

Much has been written about the “stickiness” of consumer payment apps and their value in cementing bank and credit union relationships with customers and members, but behind the scenes at most financial institutions (FIs) there is a far stickier relationship.  In this relationship, the bank or credit union is the customer and the cement composed of those mission critical services provided by their core processing vendor.

Most bankers would agree that, all other things being equal, minimizing the cost of complexity is a key operational goal, which normally means consolidating around a limited number of financial services vendors. The big “gotcha” in the above statement, however, is that all other things are rarely equal, and recent industry trends reveal that other factors are at work.

In a perfect world, core banking service providers would serve as one-stop shops for ancillary products like mobile banking and remote deposit capture as well. In fact, an acquisition spree by the cores over recent years was aimed to round out their portfolios and solidify that single-source status. Recently, however, newer startups have delivered compelling enough innovations to prompt financial institutions (FIs) to expand their horizons. 

The spiraling cost of complying with an ever increasing regulatory burden is possibly the greatest challenge facing US banks and credit unions – it’s not an exaggeration to label it an existential threat for some institutions. However, this threat can be mitigated by utilizing expertise available from compliance and strategic sourcing firms as well as via software automation. It won’t make the regulations go away, but it makes the process more efficient and helps make it less likely that something is overlooked.

Vendor contract amendments can seem pretty straight forward – a few paragraphs over a couple of pages that offers some modifications to the master contract that probably represent some improvement to current terms and conditions. The amendment may be perfectly innocuous or it may suggest some material changes. Either way, it is important not to treat this as a "no brainer."

In recent posts, we have offered words of caution concerning the perils of free money when considering a proposal, contract or addendum from a vendor. As part of our work, we are continuously monitoring the market to remain current on the trends that impact our clients. Lately, we have seen a real-time case study playing out in the market that reinforces why every proposed vendor contract amendment should be reviewed carefully.

SRM was honored to be the signature sponsor at this year’s National Association of Federally Insured Credit Unions’ (NAFCU) 50^th annual conference. Given that more than a quarter of the roughly 250 credit unions in attendance are SRM clients, this was clearly an event our company wanted to help support. For anyone who missed the details, NAFCU hosted the four-day annual gathering in Honolulu, Hawaii drawing more than a thousand leaders from credit unions and service providers.

In less than a decade, the smartphone has become essential to our daily lives. Perhaps ironically, its primary function of allowing us to make a call at almost any time and anywhere has been superseded by a dizzying array of other activities it facilitates, including banking. The convenience and accessibility with the smartphone and subsequent digital devices, e.g., tablet, wearables, etc., has changed things radically for financial institutions (FIs). Today, consumers determine how, when and where they will access financial services. To say this change has complicated things for banks and credit unions is an understatement.