Does Your Bank Have a Deposit Strategy?

Many banks lack a clear, written deposit strategy and funding plan. For the last several years, that’s been somewhat understandable. After all, deposits flowed into banks and have now reached historic highs, even though banks on average pay little or nothing in interest on the vast majority of those deposits.

Now that’s changing. Deposits are an increasingly important topic for bank boards. We are on the front end of an environment bankers have not seen in almost a decade. The Federal Reserve raised the fed funds target rate by 75 basis points last year, and three more rate increases are expected this year.

Banks already are seeing deposit competition heat up. Close to 64 percent of bankers said that deposit competition had increased in the last year, and 77 percent expected it to increase during the subsequent 12 months, according to Promontory Interfinancial Network’s Bank Executive Business Outlook Survey in the third quarter of 2017. Although in the past banks have had to compete in rising rate environments, we’ve never seen a point in history quite like this one, and it would be wise to assume rising rates will impact deposits, as well as your bank’s funding mix and profit margins.

There are a couple of reasons why the environment has changed. Historically, big banks ignored the rate wars for deposits, a game that was left to community banks. But this time, the new liquidity coverage ratio requirement that came out of the Basel III accords could encourage big banks to get more competitive on deposit rates. The ratio, finalized in the U.S. in 2014, requires banks with more than $250 billion in assets to keep a ratio of 100 percent high-quality liquid assets, such as Treasury bonds, relative to potentially volatile funds. Banks that move toward more retail deposits will have a lower expected level of volatile funds.

Also, banks have a majority of their deposits in liquid accounts while term deposits, such as CDs, are at historic lows. There’s no hard-and-fast rule to know how much of those non-term deposits will leave your bank as rates rise.

As the economy has improved, surging loan growth has put more pressure on the need to grow deposits. Loan-to-deposit ratios are rising, and as banks need to fund further growth, demand for deposits will rise. What this will do to competition for deposits and, therefore, deposit rates, is unclear. We have found that many banks aren’t raising rates on their loans, and the best borrowers can easily shop around to get the best rates. This will put pressure on margins if banks don’t raise rates on loans as interest rates rise.

Still another factor is that people have had a decade since the financial crisis to get comfortable with the benefits of online and mobile banking. Online banks, not incurring costs associated with physical branches, often offer higher interest rates on deposits than traditional banks.

One of the best ways to prepare for the changing environment is to make sure your bank has a written, well-prepared deposit strategy. We’re not talking about a 100-page document. In fact, the asset/liability committee (ALCO) of the bank may need a five- to 10-page report highlighting the rate environment, the bank’s deposit strategy, and alternative funding plans and projections. The bank’s full board may just need a three- to four-page summary of the bank’s deposit strategy, making sure that management is able to address key questions:

1. Who are your bank’s top 10 competitors, and what are they doing with rates? What new products are they offering?
2. How will the Federal Reserve’s expected moves in the coming year impact our rates, our margins and our annual net income?
3. What is our bank’s strategy for contacting our largest depositors and determining their needs?
4. What new deposit products do we plan to offer, and how will we offer them only to our best customers? Not all customers or deposits have equal value to the bank.
5. What is our funding plan? In other words, what are our alternatives if we need deposits to grow, and what will they cost? This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer.

While it’s important not to be caught off guard in a rising-rate environment, rising rates can be a good thing for a bank with a solid deposit strategy in place. For the first time in a long time, the wind will be in the sails of bankers. They just need a plan for navigating the changing environment ahead.