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Regulators are right to target overdraft and other fees as obstacles to banks offering affordable checking account options, but thats just the beginning in developing transactional products that work for consumers.
March 31 -
BB&T has agreed to buy the Bank of Kentucky for $363 million in cash and stock. The acquisition would allow the $188 billion-asset BB&T to expand in the northern Kentucky and Cincinnati region, where the $1.9 billion-asset Bank of Kentucky operates 32 branches.
September 8 -
Digit, a startup in San Francisco targeting millennials, has launched a service that crunches checking account data to determine daily amounts to automatically transfer into users' savings accounts. Its debut points to how personal financial management services are growing up to do the work on the consumer's behalf.
February 25 -
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg said the agency plans to release a report next year exploring how mobile phone use could help expand access to banks.
December 5
In today's highly active regulatory environment, it feels like the banking agencies send us daily emails asking for comments on a particular industry topic. And the requests don't always relate to a proposed rule under consideration. For most banks and industry representatives, there are many day-to-day tasks that are more important than providing input to regulators on these subjects.
But
Most stalled merger transactions result from consumer advocacy groups criticizing a bank's record in providing banking services to underserved communities within its market area.
The very public outcry over a pending merger often focuses on how strong an acquirer's CRA compliance plan will be once it manages the target bank's branch network. In various cases, critics have pointed to the records of reaching the underserved for both the acquirer and the bank to be purchased.
Historically, a popular approach to overcoming the complaints is to analyze the branch map of the bank receiving the complaint – noting the placement of those branches relative to low-income census tracts, their hours of operation and the services made available to underserved consumers in those branches.
BB&T, for instance, successfully used this argument to overcome complaints from consumer advocacy groups based on its lending practices in its 2015 acquisition of
In that transaction, the Fed specifically cited BB&T's branch distribution in its markets and the accessibility of its branches to low- to moderate-income areas when it evaluated BB&T's CRA performance. The analysis in that
But in the digital age, pointing to a branch network that caters to underserved consumers will increasingly not work to hasten merger transactions.
Banks are closing and consolidating branch locations at a stunning pace, and most are carefully studying transaction volume to justify continued operations of branches. As banks continue to pull back on physical branches, they will be less able to point to brick-and-mortar branches as their tool to engage underserved consumers, which was a common strategy before the rapid emergence of digital technology.
In contrast, banks' focus on mobile products not only provides innovative benefits to underserved consumers who may lack branch access, but in light of regulators' interest in the potential for mobile technology to expand economic inclusion, this focus may also help institutions overcome regulatory and community-based challenges to mergers.
Institutions looking to overcome challenges to mergers can provide data illustrating how their mobile applications engage underserved communities. That can ease any criticism of their branch networks. This only furthers the argument that banks should focus investments on mobile and online platforms. They can look to institutions such as
The FDIC, which published a
The purpose of many of these applications is to assist consumers in understanding their savings needs and the behaviors they need to adopt in order to get access to cheaper financial services. These tools, when packaged with a marketing plan targeted to underserved communities and detailed by tracking consumer adoption, would create an ideal rebuttal to any consumer group alleging that a bank is not adequately serving its communities.
Banks should use this opportunity to write to the FDIC about their efforts to serve more consumers through mobile technology. Banks can demonstrate to their regulators this is an effective route to reaching the underserved. After all, approval of your next merger may depend on it.
Jonathan Hightower is a partner at Bryan Cave.
