By: Martina Dowidchuk, Senior Consultant The stock market continues to remind us of its inefficiencies. Most banks saw their stock values decline last year despite the industry’s record levels of earnings, continuing growth, and strong asset quality levels. In fact, the month of December 2018 recorded the greatest monthly stock decline since 1931. The broad...
By: Bob Viering, Senior Consultant and Manager of Lending Services For many community banks today, remaining independent is the number one strategic priority. There are many reasons boards believe remaining independent is important: the board believes that the shareholders’ investment will be maximized over a longer time horizon; that the bank as an independent local...
By: Bill Elliott, CRCM, Senior Consultant and Manager of Compliance As you are no doubt aware, the issue of flood insurance has been unsettled for the last 18 months, and the formal FEMA flood program is only approved until the fall. But, after a long wait, the regulators have published additional regulation for private flood...
By: Mike Lehr, Human Resources Consultant Never have businesses had to do so much recruiting. Never have they spent so much money on it. Yet, they have never been worse at it. The interviewing of applicants highlights this demise. Imagine going to a team meeting. It has no agenda. It has no planning. It has...
By: Mike Detrow, CISSP, Senior Consultant and Manager of IT Just like technology, we have seen information security risk assessments evolve over time. Initially, risk assessments were focused on the core system as the main repository of customer data, as well as paper documents and PCs. However, financial institutions continue to use new technologies to...
The OCC, Federal Reserve Board, and FDIC (collectively, the agencies) jointly issued a notice of proposed rulemaking titled Real Estate Appraisals, dated December 7, 2018 which was published in the Federal Register for a 60-day comment period. The Appraisal NPR proposes to increase the threshold for residential real estate transactions requiring an appraisal from $250,000...
By: William J. Showalter, CRCM, CRP, Senior Consultant We seem to be in a bit of a lull in flood insurance rule enforcement by the financial institution regulators. There were only 15 enforcement actions with civil money penalties (CMP) totaling $523,961 in 2018. So far this year, we have had only two such enforcement actions,...
