Insights, analysis, and field notes.
Guides on banking data, walkthroughs of FFIEC and UBPR metrics, and commentary on what's moving inside the call report filings.
Noninterest Income: Benchmarks, Examiner Focus, and Fee Mix
Across community banks in aggregate, noninterest income accounts for roughly 15–20% of total revenue; at the median community bank it is closer to 10%. …
Core Bank Earnings Before Credit Costs: A Worked Analysis
Pre-provision net revenue is the metric that separates credit-cycle noise from franchise performance. This post is the worked analysis; the glossary entry carries the …
How to Read a Bank Balance Sheet (Schedule RC)
At the end of 2022, the banking industry's aggregate AOCI balance swung to negative $326 billion, about -14.7% of total reported equity, after touching …
De Novo Banks: How to Analyze a Bank With No Track Record
From 2010 through 2017, new bank charters in the United States nearly stopped: only about 30 opened in eight years, and just 15 after …
Bank M&A Analysis: How to Evaluate a Deal from Call Reports
The U.S. had more than 15,000 FDIC-insured banks and thrifts in 1990. It has about 4,300 today. That contraction (mostly mergers, some failures) happened …
Allowance Coverage Ratio: How to Judge Reserve Adequacy
A bank can hold $50 million in reserves and still be dangerously thin. The dollar figure is nearly meaningless without context: specifically, what those …
Net Non-Core Funding Dependence: What It Measures
The funding-mix measures that flag a bank's reliance on non-core money are computed every quarter and published in its UBPR. In the failures of …
HMDA and CRA Data: What Bankers and Analysts Need to Know
A bank with a 1.10% ROA, a CET1 ratio north of 13%, and a clean NPL book can still have a "Needs to Improve" …
How to Read Schedule RC-C: The Loan Portfolio Breakdown
At the average community bank, commercial real estate loans now represent roughly 40–45% of total loans, and in many $500M–$2B institutions that number runs …
Interest Rate Risk and Duration in Banks Explained
At the end of 2022, U.S. banks were sitting on roughly $620 billion in unrealized losses on their securities portfolios, the product of buying …