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When you begin thinking about financial risk management, you must begin with a vision for your loan portfolio and the similarity of a loan portfolio to that of an investment portfolio. Now that you have that vision in place, we can focus on the overall strategy to achieve that vision. A valuable first step in loan portfolio monitoring is to establish a targeted value by a certain time (say, our targeted retirement age). Similarly, it’s important that we establish our vision for the loan portfolio regarding overall diversification, return and the management of risk levels. The next step is to create a strategy to achieve the targeted state. By focusing on the gaps between our current state and the vision state we have created, we can develop an action plan for achieving the future/vision state. I am going to introduce some rather unique ideas here. Consider which of your portfolio segments are overweight? One that comes to mind would be the commercial real estate portfolio. The binge that has taken place over the past five plus years has resulted in an unhealthy concentration of loans in the commercial real estate segment. In this one area alone, we will face the greatest challenge of right-sizing our portfolio mix and achieving the appropriate risk model per our vision. We have to assess our overall credit risk in the portfolios next. For small business and consumer portfolios, this is relatively easy using the various credit scores that are available to assess the current risk. For the larger commercial and industrial portfolios and the commercial real estate portfolios, we must employ some more manual processes to assess risk. Unfortunately, we have to perform appropriate risk assessments (current up-to-date risk assessments) in order to move on to the next stage of this overall process (which is to execute on the strategy). Once we have the dollar amounts of either growth or divestiture in various portfolio segments, we can employ the risk assessment to determine the appropriate execution of either growth or divestiture.

By: Tom Hannagan Part 5 This continues the updated review of results from the Uniform Bank Performance Reports (UBPR), courtesy of the FDIC, for 2008. The UBPR is based on the quarterly required Call Reports submitted by insured banks. The FDIC compiles peer averages for various bank size groupings. Here are some findings for the two largest groups, covering 494 reporting banks. I wanted to see how the various profit performance components compare to the costs of credit risk discussed in my previous post. It is even more apparent than it was in early 2008 that banks still have a ways to go to be fully pricing loans for both expected and unexpected risk. Peer Group 2 (PG2) consists of 305 reporting banks between $1 billion and $3 billion in assets. PG2’s Net Interest Income was 5.75 percent of average total assets for the year. This is also down, as expected, from 6.73 percent in 2007. Net Interest Expense also decreased from 3.07 percent in 2007 to 2.31 percent for 2008. Net Interest Margin, also declined from 3.66 percent in 2007 to 3.42 percent in 2008, or a loss of 24 basis points. These margins are 31 bps or 10 percent higher than found in Peer Group 1 (PG1), but the drop of .24 percent was much larger than the .05 percent decline in PG1. As with all banks, Net Interest Margins have shown a steady chronic decline, but the drops for PG2 have been coming in larger chunks the last two years — -24 basis points last year after dropping 16 points from 2006 to 2007. Behind the drop in margins, we find loans yields of 6.53 percent for 2008, which is down from 7.82 percent in 2007. This is a decline of 129 basis points or 16 percent. Meanwhile, rates paid on interest-earning deposits dropped from 3.70 percent in 2007 to 2.75 percent in 2008. This 95 basis point decline represents a 26 percent lower cost of interest-bearing deposits. Again, with a steeper decline in interest costs, you would think that margins should have improved somewhat. It wasn’t meant to be. We see the same two culprits as we did in PG1. Total deposit balances declined from 78 percent of average assets to 77 percent which means again, that a larger amount had to be borrowed to fund assets. Secondly, non-interest bearing demand deposits continued an already steady decline from 5.58 percent of average assets in 2007 to 5.03 percent. This, of course, resulted in fewer deposit balances relative to total asset size and a lower proportion of interest-cost-free deposits. Check my next blog for more on an analysis of Peer Group 2’s fee income, operating expenses and their use of risk-based pricing.

By: Tom Hannagan Part 4 Let’s dig a bit deeper into why Peer Group 1’s margins didn’t improve. We see two possible reasons: Total deposit balances declined from 72 percent of average assets to 70 percent. This means that a larger amount had to be borrowed to fund their assets. Secondly, non-interest bearing demand deposits declined from 4.85 percent of average assets to 4.24 percent. So, fewer deposit balances relative to total asset size, along with a lower proportion of interest-cost-free deposits, appear to have made the difference. Fee income Non-interest income, again as a percent of average total assets, was down to 1.12 percent from 1.23 percent in 2007. This was a decline of 9 percent. For Peer Group 1 (PG1), fees have also been steadily declining relative to asset size, down from 1.49 percent of assets in 2005. A lot of fee income is deposit based and largely based on non-interest bearing deposits. So, the declining interest-free balances, as a percent of total assets, are a source of pressure on fee income and have a negative impact on net interest margins. Operating expenses Operating expenses constituted more bad news as they increased from 2.63 percent to 2.77 percent of average assets. Most of the large scale cost-cutting didn’t get started early enough to favorably impact this number for last year. Historically, this metric has moved down, irregularly, as the size of the largest banks has grown. This number stood at 2.54 percent in 2006, for instance. We saw increase in both 2007 and again in 2008. As a result of the decline in margins and the larger percentage decline in fee income, while operating costs increased, the Peer Group 1 efficiency ratio lost ground from 57.71 percent in 2007 up to 63.70 percent in 2008. This 10 percent increase is a move to the bad. It means every dollar in gross revenue [net interest income + fee income] cost them almost 64 cents in administrative expenses in 2008. This metric averaged 55 cents in 2005/2006. The total impact of changes in margin performance, fee income, operating expenses and the 2008 increase in provision expense of 87 basis points, we arrive at a total decline in pre-tax operating income of 1.23 percent on total assets. That is a total decline of 80 percent from the pre-tax performance in 2007 of 1.53 percent pre-tax ROA to the 2008 result for the group of only .30 percent pre-tax ROA. It would appear that banks have not been utilizing pricing enough credit risk into their loan rates. This would be further confirmed if you compared bank loan rates to the historic risk spreads and absolute rates that the market currently has priced into both investment grade and below-investment-grade corporate bonds. These spreads have decreased some very recently, but it is predicted that more credit risk is present than bank lending rates would indicate.
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