3 top articles at top of home page.
Satisfaction with a product generally declines over time, whereas contentment with an experience generally grows over time. This observation, shared by presenter Jacob Morgan recently at the ABA National Conference for Community Bankers, resonates. While I might be ready for a new fishing pole every couple of years, that memory of the fish that got away gets to be a better story every time I tell it. [Continue]
Chimney is a fintech that develops website tools — calculators, mainly — to engage potential loan customers. CEO Matthew Covi speaks about online lending and using calculators to attract customers. In today’s ultra-competitive environment, differentiating your online experience from the starting line can be crucial. [Continue]
Bank Holding Company Association Managing Director Tom Bengtson lays out highlights of its May seminar, which will focus on family-owned bank issues and the latest in tech developments. [Continue]
Green Bay, Wis.-based Nicolet Bankshares, Inc., is expanding into the Twin Cities market by acquiring Eau Claire, Wis.-based Charter Bankshares, Inc., and its subsidiary Charter Bank in an approximately $158 million stock-and-cash transaction. The merger is expected to be complete in the third quarter of this year. [Continue]
Community banks must properly vet their managed security service providers and frequently update employee passwords to protect against the ever-evolving cybersecurity threat landscape, experts say. This comes as Russia’s war in Ukraine brings fresh fears that Russia could use hacking against U.S. companies to strike back against punishing sanctions levied in response to the invasion. [Continue]
A social media presence can be many things, but haphazard isn’t one of them. We’ve all seen the blogs that feature posts from three years ago or the Facebook page that has an update once a month. One of the many challenges of social efforts is the number of channels to manage. [Continue]
A major leap for community banks has been receiving the documents electronically. Dual monitors allow a speedy credit analyst to have the tax return open on one screen, the spreading system on the other, and enter a tax return within minutes — saving the “look down, look up” movements of transferring data from paper to computer. But a step further is not to manually enter a tax return at all. [Continue]
Judy Guttau, a key leader at Treynor, Iowa-based TS Bank, will retire on May 1 after 43 years at the bank. As she’s donned many hats over the years, her main goal has remained the same: Embodying the commitment of TS Bank to its employees and the communities it serves, a promise she’s made good on in many ways. [Continue]
There was a day when customers were willing to wait a week or more to get a face-to-face appointment with an investment advisor. Those days, well, “they’re over,” said Joe Salomone, vice president of Bankers’ Wealth Management, a division of Madison, Wis.-based Bankers’ Bank, which recently announced the release of a digital platform through which community banks can provide “on demand” investment advice. [Continue]
Have you gotten weary of people advising you to master social media? I get it. I often shake my head in disbelief at the fatuous comments I find in my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds. I do accept, however, that just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not important. (Exercise comes to mind.) You need to engage on social media because that’s where the customers are. [Continue]