As bankers continue to rely on technology to enhance operations and stay competitive, third-party fintech vendors are becoming increasingly important. While technological advances help improve compliance, products and services and due diligence among other, they also carry significant increased risk when paired with such third party arrangements. [Continue]
What we didn’t expect when we put our April architecture issue together was that in the week-long stretch between going into production and sending the issue to the printer, we’d all become bit players in an unfolding calamity of a different sort: The coronavirus pandemic. [Continue]
Community banks by definition are traditionally bound by geography that cloud banking deems irrelevant. Now foreign tech firms are reaching into the United States and jumping into the increasingly competitive field of all-things-cloud. [Continue]
While diverse hiring practices and an awareness of the growing demographic shift within the United States has lessened the gap between minority and non-minority bankers in the past several years, there’s still work to be done, particularly when it comes to including minority bankers in decision-making processes. [Continue]
While younger generations happen to be primarily big-bank customers, it’s not necessarily because they like to. Big banks capture their attention by focusing their marketing efforts on their “superior” technology, which overshadows smaller community banks. The truth is consumers across all generations prefer the localized, personal service they receive from community institutions. [Continue]
I had an experience recently where an eagle-eyed operations employee at Prime Security Bank in Eagan, Minn., prevented a series of fraudulent checks from going through when she noticed that the signature on the checks did not match the signatures on the signature card. [Continue]
If you don’t believe we live in an angry, cynical world, wade on over to Twitter for a half an hour and drill down on the discourse. Yikes. A person who shares an innocuous opinion can, within minutes, find dozens have hacked their ideas into bloody chunks. [Continue]
Comments from two bankers speaking at the annual Acquire or Be Acquired conference piqued my interest. Jim Ryan, CEO of the $20 billion Old National Bancorp, and Dave Provost, executive vice chairman of the $47 billion of TCF Financial Corporation, cast light on a couple of big industry deals. [Continue]
Practifi is a Chicago startup developing business management tools for financial institutions and wealth advisors. Adrian Johnstone and Glenn Elliott, Practifi’s co-founders, explain how customer relationship management tools might be applied to functions beyond the advisory realm. [Continue]
All banks are required to assess the risk of a pandemic to their business and have a plan to address providing continued service during such an event. Does your plan include a contingency to allow some employees to work from home? [Continue]