Blog: Account Management

Community banking's advantage is real, and it is almost always described wrongly.

It is not service, which every institution claims and few can measure. It is not branch convenience, which matters less each year. It is not product breadth, which a community bank will never win.

It is local decision-making with real credit judgment — the ability to underwrite a borrower a model would decline, to structure something a policy manual does not anticipate, and to ...

Concentration risk is the single most reliable predictor of which banks fail. Not credit underwriting quality in the abstract — concentration. Institutions that failed in the last several downturns generally did not make uniquely bad loans; they made a large number of ordinary loans that turned out to be the same loan.

This post treats concentration as a portfolio management discipline across every loan type. Our companion post on

This is the operational companion to our guide on HMDA reporting requirements, which covers coverage, the data points, and how the data is used. This one covers a narrower question: how to get the register clean before March 1.

The distinction matters because HMDA failures are almost never failures of understanding. Institutions know what the fields mean. The register is wrong because the data was captured ...