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The Bottom Line

Banks and credit unions are taking a new look at the role their core systems play in delivering products and services to customers.

In a recent conversation with a Colorado banker about tech strategies, he mentioned a looming investor meeting. He was putting together an overview and was trying to decide the best way to proceed.

"These are the people who provide the underlying support for what we're doing, so I want to make sure they know the road we're on will provide the value they want," he told me.

After a two-year hiatus, Bank Director's Acquire or Be Acquired was back with an in-person event in Scottsdale, AZ, last week.

Financial institutions should brace for substantial regulatory change in the year ahead.

Turnover at the top of several federal agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), foreshadows more scrutiny for FIs.

Everything seems to be on the table, including timelines for implementing the Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) accounting standard, data privacy, and Bank Secrecy Act compliance.

There are, however, several areas that we believe merit the most attention in the coming months.

Many of you will remember the initial fear experienced when the Internet debuted in the 1990s. At the time, the popular narrative was that every business, no matter how big or small, would be on the information superhighway by the year 2000, replacing conventional media forms like newspapers, billboards, and the yellow pages. Fast forward nearly 30 years, and now everyone’s life is touched (and in many ways, sustained) by the Web.

Creating a US central bank digital currency (CBDC) could have several benefits; however, it would also cause a plethora of systemic challenges for the existing financial system.

It’s not surprising commerce continues to migrate to digital channels across all sectors and that the pandemic has pushed further the already speedy digital banking trend. In the FI world, consumers rely on their bank or credit union’s virtual branch to navigate real-life decisions.

A recent family trip to Florida’s gulf coast reminded me of how much importance customers put into “What it says on the website.” We visited an area decimated by Hurricane Michael the year prior; although it remains a beautiful destination, the storm’s impact was still evident. Some businesses only had websites left standing, as we soon came to learn.

Given the whirlwind of recent events, it seems like ages since January, when one of our payments experts Larry Pruss weighed in on Visa’s acquisition of Plaid, API aggregator for P2P players such as Venmo. He discussed what this combination could mean for banks and credit unions going forward, reinforcing two key points:  

1. Financial institutions are hungry for objective expert opinions on market developments; and 
2. The strategic moves of major industry vendors – not just their direct competitors – can have a major impact on their competitive position.     

In the months since the pandemic was announced, SRM’s experts have weighed in on the operational impacts of COVID-19. We also gathered perspectives from a cross-section of banks and credit unions through a survey conducted in the early days of shelter-in-place orders (results from survey 2 coming soon). Now that the bills have come due for April and May, we noticed some unusual emerging trends in the invoice tracking data.

Buckle up: we’re in for a ride. Regardless of your political persuasion, all signs point to an extended stretch of market volatility as we head into the 2020 election cycle, which by many measures is already hitting its stride. The 2020 budget season is playing out against this backdrop, with budget-setters up against even greater uncertainty than usual. The question looms, as the political barrage reaches new heights in 2020, how can banks and credit unions remain flexible to the economic variables?