2024 has been a big year for banking compliance, with some Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) updates having gone into effect April 1st, 2024 and Section 1071 regulations going back and forth due to legal challenges and ongoing litigation. Compliance dates, as of June 2024, are now scheduled to go into effect beginning July 18th, 2025.
As a service-oriented community bank, Bank of Idaho is committed to making a difference in their community. With locations spanning. Eastern Idaho, the Treasure Valley, and Eastern Washington, they offer a range of services from personal checking and savings, business checking and savings, business lending, SBA lending, mortgage lending, and trust and wealth management services.
As we continue to hear stories of businesses struggling to find and retain talent, it's becoming clear that this is the new normal. Many long-time employees retired en masse during the pandemic, leaving banks and other businesses struggling to attract new talent to fill those gaps.
First Community Bank and Trust has a mission to be the bank whose customers wouldn’t think of banking anywhere else. With a history rooted in serving their communities and helping customers achieve their financial goals, the bank upholds core values of integrity, teamwork, excellence, and innovation. They offer a diverse range of personal and business banking services, emphasizing the importance of customer security and convenience through advanced online banking solutions.
In today’s financial landscape, community financial institutions find themselves navigating through a unique set of challenges. The wave of bank failures throughout 2023 put a spotlight on the volatile side of the industry, making it critical for community institutions to remind the world of their resilience.
New Market Bank is a family-owned community bank that has been serving the South Metro area of Minnesota for over a century. Founded in 1905, the bank has grown to become a $193.4 million institution, with branches in Elko New Market, Lakeville, and Prior Lake. The bank has a rich history of family ownership, with Anita Drentlaw currently serving as CEO, President, and CFO, and representing the fourth generation of her family to lead the bank.
Banks are not just competing with other banks anymore. It is hard to even know who our competitors are when the landscape is rapidly changing, and customer expectations are being based on experiences from other industries – Amazon, Spotify, Walmart, and Chick-fil-A to name a few.
With tightening margins, inflation, and high interest rates, community bankers face not only a challenging lending environment, but also a battle to sustain deposits. Customers are more knowledgeable than ever and are prepared to shop across multiple channels to find the right fit for their deposit needs. So how can community financial institutions look to compete with larger banks and credit unions to attract those customers?
As Americans are beginning to feel the weight of current inflation, thoughts of a coming recession have been on the minds of many. Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2018 in an attempt to combat inflation. While this announcement has put some minds at ease, there are still many Americans concerned this is just further evidence a recession is coming.
Citibank recently announced plans to eliminate overdraft fees beginning this summer, making it the largest bank thus far to implement this policy, according to the press release. The bank announced it would stop charging overdraft fees, returned item fees, and overdraft protection fees in an effort to be more financially inclusive.