19 posts tagged with "Community Bank"

There's a question that keeps coming up in every conversation about banking strategy. If most transactions happen digitally, what are branches for?

The Fed raised rates again this week, the seventh increase this year. The federal funds rate is now 4.25 to 4.50 percent. That's 425 basis points in nine months. I've been paying more attention to the securities line on the balance sheet lately, and now I'm trying to understand what all these rate hikes actually do to that portfolio.

Exploring transaction data with pandas gave me a baseline. Counting things, grouping things, building a sense of what normal looks like. That was useful, but it left me staring at tables of numbers. What I wanted was to see the shape of what's happening over time.

I've spent time thinking about stablecoins, the Terra collapse, and the regulatory questions surrounding both. It gave me a better sense of where the industry might be headed and why regulators are taking a careful approach. But it also highlighted something I'd been noticing. The conversations happening around banking and the conversations happening inside a bank are very different.

I wanted to try the same data tools on transaction-level records. Mortgage lending data is useful, but the day-to-day activity of a bank lives in its transactions. Deposits, withdrawals, transfers, loan payments. Every client interaction with their account generates a record.

Schedule RC, the balance sheet section of the public call report, is where a bank lays out what it owns and owes, so I pulled one up to see how it is put together. I've read balance sheets before from my startup days, but a bank's looks different in several ways.

The call report keeps coming up in any conversation about bank financials. I realized I didn't really know what was in it. So I pulled one up.

The core banking system keeps coming up as one of the biggest constraints on what's possible in bank technology. I have started to understand why.

Understanding how banks make money turned out to be more interesting than I expected.