Margin Advisory Services

US Banking Alliance guarantees to quickly develop the best strategies to increase net interest income with an emphasis on more effectively reaching core customers and expanding your customer base. An enhanced financial management process, especially a strong loan and deposit process, will increase every bank’s financial performance.

Strategy Sessions

The engagement begins after conducting a thorough analysis of the factors impacting your net interest margin, including running each of the loans booked in the previous twelve months and your deposit base through our analytic tools.

USBA’s consultants facilitate strategy sessions designed to incorporate your bank’s knowledge of its local market, strategic plan, and risk tolerance with our expertise in net interest margin management. The typical engagement includes seven strategy sessions: an introduction, commercial lending, mortgage lending, consumer lending, funding/deposits, commercial loan training, and a wrap-up session. The fast paced, intense two and a half days are focused on getting your people involved in the process. The key is balancing competitive factors with profitability and addressing the emotional and behavioral factors that are typically ignored. This approach facilitates the immediate use of the loan and deposit pricing models, as well as quick implementation of the recommendations. Typically, 90% of the recommendations can be implemented in less than 30 days. The USBA strategy sessions address the following areas:

Lending

Funding

Pricing Models

USBA provides loan pricing models that support the bank’s strategies to grow more profitably. The commercial pricing model empowers your lenders to develop alternative pricing solutions that result in winning more large, high quality loans and getting paid better on the smaller, lesser quality loans.

USBA’s comprehensive pricing models are the easiest to use in the banking industry:

RelationshipManager	Enables commercial lenders to quantify the impact of rate, fee, deposits, relationships, and all relevant loan factors in rate setting and easily develop alternative pricing structures in two minutes or less.
MortgagePricer	Provides the ability to more profitably price in-house, residential real estate loans
LoanPricer	Ensures consumer loan pricing accounts for all key factors affecting profitability
EquityPricer	Analyzes alternative tier structures for Home Equity Lines of Credit
CD Pricer	Evaluates local deposit rates relative to wholesale funding alternatives
Money Market Pricer	Evaluates existing pricing structure versus alternative pricing structures

RelationshipManager is designed to be utilized by all commercial lenders to ensure disciplined loan pricing decisions. The other models are utilized by a committee or an individual to create multi-dimensional rate sheets which enable the bank to know the profitability of the business for which it is competing.

Financial Management

USBA has over 18 years of experience working with community banks to maximize net interest income. Our consultants will work with your bank to develop a financial management process to support your strategic objectives and create long-term shareholder value. Our ultimate goal is to increase your bank’s loan volume and retail deposit growth, optimize the cost of your funds, improve your loan and deposit pricing process and enhance your bank’s approach to financial management.

The difference between just buying or building a model and utilizing our service is results. Many banks have pricing models, marketing information systems, or product and customer profitability systems. Unfortunately, very few banks effectively integrate these tools or utilize the valuable information they provide. As a result, these tools often end up sitting on the shelf. Models, systems, and information are important components of a strong financial management process; however, they do not provide the answers. People do.

Results

In the lending area, you will win more of the larger “A” credit loans, get a greater return on loan renewals, and “lose less” on unprofitable loans. On the funding side, you will achieve the lowest cost of funds given the bank’s strategic growth objectives. We will provide a common sense approach to competing in an extremely competitive market. The key to your success is our approach for getting your people involved in the process and obtaining their buy-in. You will see immediate results and a pay back that is almost always realized in less than six months.

USBA is committed to providing you with unlimited assistance, training, resources, and support in achieving the goals established during and after our initial strategy sessions. We are also committed to ensuring your bank’s long-term success. Our over 99% licensing renewal performance provides one indicator of our success. We guarantee results.